the inner man. It is the assembly and
communion of all truly God-fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons in all
the world, bound together by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God and the
bonds of love--a Communion outside of which there is no salvation, no
Christ, no God, no comprehension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit, and no
Gospel. I belong to this Fellowship. I believe in the Communion of
saints, and I am in this Church, let me be where I may; and therefore I
no {59} longer look for Christ in lo heres or lo theres."[26] This
Church, which the Spirit is building through the ages and in all lands,
is, once more, like the experience of the individual Christian, entirely
an inward affair. "Love is the one mark and badge of Fellowship in
it."[27] No outward forms of any sort seem to him necessary for
membership in this true Church. "External gifts and offices make no
Christian, and just as little does the standing of the person, or
locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external. The kingdom
of God is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here
nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor
anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,
unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned
faith."[28]

In his Apology he says that he has withdrawn "from all theological
disputations, from all sectarian statements of creed, from baptism and
all ceremonies," and "I stand now," he adds, "only for what is
fundamental and essential for salvation"--that is, vital participation in
the Life of God revealed in the soul.[29] "I am looking," he writes in
the opening of the _Paradoxa_, "for no new and separate Church, no new
commission, no new baptism, no new dispensation. The Church has already
been founded on Christ the Rock, and since the outward keys and
sacraments have been misused and have gone by, He now administers the
sacraments inwardly in spirit and in truth. He baptizes His own, even in
the midst of Babylon, and feeds them with His own body, and will do so
unto the end of the world."[30]

In a letter to Campanus he says, "I am fully convinced [by a study of the
early Church Fathers] that, after the death of the apostles, the external
Church of Christ, with its gifts and sacraments, vanished from the earth
and withdrew into heaven, and is now hidden in spirit and in truth, and
for these past fourteen hundred years {60} the