There is in us, Peter Sterry says, a _unity of
spirit_ which holds all things together in an _at-once_ experience, "a
spire-top of spirit where all things meet and sit recollected and
concentred in an unfathomed Depth of Life."[20] Most of these men were
in revolt against scholasticism and all its works. They speak often
very slightingly of "Reasoning," the attempt to find a way to ultimate
Realities by logical syllogisms, but they, nevertheless, believed great
things of man's rational and moral nature. They are often confused and
cloudy in their explicit accounts of this ultimate moral and rational
nature. They everywhere indicate the conceptual limitations {xxxi}
under which even those who were the most emancipated from tradition
were compelled to do their thinking in that age. They could not break
the age-long spell and mighty fascination with which the Adam story and
the Garden of Eden picture had held the Christian world. They were
convinced, however, that the Augustinian interpretation of the fall,
with its entail of an indelible taint upon the race forever, was an
inadequate, if not an untrue account, though they could not quite
arrive at an insight which enabled them to speak with authority on the
fundamental nature of man. But with an instinct that pointed right,
they took Adam as a type of the unspoiled man, and they saw writ large
in him the possibilities and potentialities of man. What had been
originally possible in Adam became, according to their thought, actual
realization in Jesus Christ--the form and type of man, the true Head of
the race--and in spite of the havoc and spoiling, which sin had
wrought, that original possibility, that divine potentiality, still
reappears in every child, who comes now, as Adam did, made in the image
of God, with the breath of God in him, and with creative freedom of
will to settle his own destiny. Some of the Reformers whom I am here
studying centre this image of God, this immense divine potentiality, in
the ideal man, in man as God conceives him in his perfect state, or as
God by His Grace intends him to be, and they do not go the whole bold
way of asserting that this man we know, this man who lives in time and
space, who loves and sins and suffers, has and always has, in the very
structure of his inmost moral and rational being, a divine, unlost,
inalienable, soul-centre which is unsundered from God, and bears
eternal witness to our origin from Him, our potentia