appalling
violation of law, never to be forgiven until the full requirements of
sovereign justice are met and balanced and satisfied. All this seemed
to them artificial and false. Salvation, as they understand it, cannot
be conceived as escape from debt nor as the satisfaction of justice,
since it is a personal life-relationship with a personal God who is and
always was eternal Love. God's universe, both outer and inner, is
loaded with moral significance, is meant for discipline, and therefore
it has its stern aspects and drives its lessons home with the
unswerving hammer of _consequences_. But in the personal Heart of the
universe, Love and Tenderness and Sympathy and Forgiveness are supreme,
and every process and every instrument of salvation, in the divine
purpose, is vital, ethical, spiritual.

God has shown Himself as Father. He has revealed the immeasurable
suffering which sin inflicts on love. To find the Father-Heart; to cry
"Abba" in filial joy; to die to sin and to be born to love, is to be
saved. Jacob Boehme gave this new conception of God, and its bearing
{xlviii} on the way of salvation, the most adequate expression that was
given by any of this group, but all these so-called spiritual Reformers
herein studied had reached the same insight at different levels of
adequacy. Their return to a more vital conception of salvation, with
its emphasis on the value of personality, brought with it, too, a new
humanitarian spirit and a truer estimate of the worth of man. As they
re-discovered the love of God, they also found again the gospel of love
and brotherhood which is woven into the very tissue of the original
gospel of divine Fatherhood.

Their revised eschatology was due, at least partly, to this altered
account of the character of God, but it was also partly due to their
profound tendency to deal with all matters of the soul in terms of life
and vital processes. Heaven and Hell were no longer thought of as
terminal places, where the saved were everlastingly rewarded and the
lost forever punished. Heaven and Hell were for them inward
conditions, states of the soul, the normal gravitation of the Spirit
toward its chosen centre. Heaven and Hell cease, therefore, to be
eschatological in the true sense of the word; they become present
realities, tendencies of life, ways of reacting toward the things of
deepest import. Heaven, whether here or in any other world, is the
condition of complete adjustmen