tever comes spontaneously out of
the subconscious is divinely given. It mothers strange
offspring--Esaus as well as Jacobs; its openings, its inrushes, its
bubblings must be severely tested. Impulses of many sorts feel
categorically imperative, but some call to deeds of light and some to
deeds of darkness. They cannot be taken at their face value; they must
be judged in some Court which is less capricious and which is guided by
a more universal principle--something _semper et ubique_. A spiritual
religion of the full and complete type will, I believe, have inward,
mystical depth, it will keep vitalized and intensified with its
experiences of divine supplies, and of union and unification with an
environing Spirit, but it must at the same time soundly supplement its
more or less capricious and subjective, and always fragmentary,
mystical insights with the steady and unwavering testimony of Reason,
and no less with the immense objective illumination of History.

III

The men whom I am here calling Spiritual Reformers are examples of this
wider synthesis. They all read and loved the mystics and they
themselves enjoyed times of direct refreshment from an inward Source of
Life, but {xxx} they were, most of them, at the same time, devoted
Humanists. They shared with enthusiasm the rediscovery of those
treasures which human Reason had produced, and they rose to a more
virile confidence in the sphere and capacity of Reason than had
prevailed in Christian circles since the days of the early Greek
Fathers. They took a variety of roads to their conclusion, but in one
way or another they all proclaimed that deep in the central nature of
man--an inalienable part of Reason--there was a Light, a Word, an Image
of God, something permanent, reliable, universal, and unsundered from
God himself. They all knew that man is vastly more than "mere man."
Hans Denck, one of the earliest of this group of Spiritual Reformers,
declared that there is a _witness to God_ in the soul of every man, and
that without this inward Word it would be as impossible to bring men to
God by outward means as it would be to show sunlight to eyeless men.
He anticipated the great saying of Pascal in these words, "Apart from
God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God already in
truth has Him."[18] "We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this
line of Spiritual Reformers, "of God's substance: we have heaven and
hell in ourselves."[19]