amental source in this deep where God and man are
unsundered. "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows, by
the Light and Life that is {54} in him. God the eternally true Light and
Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that
region where he knows himself in the ground of himself. . . . Man must
seek, find, and know God through an interrelation--he must find God in
himself and himself in God."[15] This deep ground of inner reality is in
every person, so far as he is a person; it shines forth as a steady
illumination in the soul, and, while everything else is transitory, this
Word is eternal and has been the moral and spiritual guide of all peoples
in all ages.

Franck thus differs in a vital point from Schwenckfeld. The latter
starts with man as utterly lost and devoid of any inherent goodness. By
a sudden, supernatural event, at a temporal moment, divine forces break
into the soul from without and supply it with a revitalizing energy.
Man--lost, fallen, sin-blasted and utterly helpless--is by a divine and
heavenly creative movement _made_ a new Adam. For Franck, the soul has
never lost the divine Image, the pearl of supreme price, the original
element which is God Himself in the soul. We are all, in the deepest
centre of our being, like Adam, possessed of a substantial essence, not
of earth, not of time and space, not of the shadow but of the eternal,
spiritual, and heavenly type. It may become overlaid with the rubbish of
earth, it may long lie buried in the field of the human heart, it may
remain concealed, like the grain of radium in a mass of dark pitchblende,
and be forgotten, but we have only to return home within ourselves to
find the God who has never been sundered from us and who could not leave
us without leaving Himself. We do not need to cross the sea to find Him,
we do not need to climb the heavens to reach Him--the Word is nigh thee,
the Image is in thy heart, turn home and thou shalt find Him.[16]

The bottomless and abysmal nature of the human soul comes first into
clear revelation in the Person of Christ, who is, Franck declares, truly
and essentially both God and Man. In Christ the invisible, eternal, {55}
self-existent God has clothed Himself with flesh and become Man, has made
Himself visible and vocal to our spiritual eyes and ears, and in Christ
God has given us an adequate goal and norm of life, a perfect pattern
("Muster") to walk by and to