e-aims
that fulfil the good of the whole and realize the universal Will of God.
To live for the flesh instead of for the spirit, to pursue the aims of a
narrow private self where they conflict with the spirit of universal
love, to turn from the Word of God in the soul to follow the idle voices
of the moment--that is the very essence of sin. It is not inherited, it
is self-chosen, and yet there is something in our disposition which sets
itself in array against the divine revelation within us. The Adam-story
is a genuine life-picture. It is a chapter out of the book of the ages,
the life of humanity. We do not sin and fall because he did; we sin and
fall because we are human and finite, as he was, and choose the darkness
instead of the Light, prefer Satan to God, pursue the way of death
instead of the way of Life, as he did.[43]

This will be sufficient to show the essential character of the religion
of this lonely man and to present the main tendencies of his bold and
independent thought. He had no desire to be the head of a party; he was
too remote {63} from the currents of evangelical Christianity to impress
the common people whom he loved, and he was too radical a thinker to lead
even the scholars who had become liberated from tradition by their
humanistic studies and by historical insight. He was a kind of
sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things
temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life
to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the
surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and
finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity
of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who
steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the
flock, who reveals His Truth and Life in the sanctuary of the soul, and
who through the ages is building an invisible Church, a divine Kingdom of
many members, in whom He lives as the Life of their lives.

[1] Troeltsch calls him a "literarischer Prophet der alleinigen
Erloesungskraft des Geistes und des inneren Wortes," _Die Soziallehren_,
p. 886.

[2] See article by M. Cunitz in _Nouvelle Revue de Theologie_, vol. v. p.
361.

[3] See Alfred Hegler's _Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck_
(Freiburg), 1892, pp. 28-48.

[4] See next chapter for an account of Caspar Schwenckfeld.

[5] This Letter to Campanus, writ