o the soul. It comes to men like
a fresh Copernican insight which discovers a new religious
world-centre. The soul by its own inward vision, by its moral
attitude, by the swing of the will, can initiate a new relation with
God, and so produce a new inward kingdom. That, however, is not
Luther's message. He could not take that optimistic view of life
because it implied that man has within himself a native capacity for
God, and can rise to the vision and attitude which lead to a moral
renewal of the self. Luther never succeeded in clearing his principle
from scholastic complications. He never put it upon a moral and
dynamic foundation. It remains to the last a mysterious principle, and
was easily open to the antinomian interpretation, that upon the
exercise of faith God for Christ's merits "counts man justified"--an
interpretation dear to those who are slack-minded and prone to forensic
schemes of salvation.

(4) The fourth view was that of the humanist-spiritual Reformers, men
of the type of Denck and Buenderlin, who are the precursors of what we
to-day call the ethical way of salvation. They assume that salvation
is from beginning to end a moral process. God is in essence and nature
a loving, self-revealing, self-giving God, who has in all ages unveiled
Himself in revelations suited to the spiritual stature of man, has in
the fulness of time become incarnate in Christ, and forever pleads with
men through His Spirit to come to Him. Those who see and hear, those
who respond and co-operate, _i.e._ those who exercise faith, are
thereby morally transformed into an inward likeness to Him, and so
enter upon a life which prefers light to darkness, goodness to sin,
love to hate.

{77}

Schwenckfeld was not satisfied with any of these views. He knew and
loved the mystics, but he was too much impressed with the mighty Life
and message of the historical Christ to adopt the mystic's way. He
felt that Lutheran Christianity was too scholastic, too dependent on
externals, too inclined to an antinomian use of "faith." He could not
go along the path of the Humanist-Spirituals, for he believed that man
had been ruined in the Fall, was too deeply scarred with sin to help
himself, was without freewill, was devoid of native capacity for
spiritual vision and saving faith. Salvation, if it is to be effected
at all, must be initiated by Divine Grace and must be accomplished _for
man_ by God. But it could be for Schwenckfeld n