Chapter 14 | Table of Contents | Chapter 16

If God's kingdom ought to be within us then, it could not be a brain-sick folly to believe that the literal words of Christ had no deceit, falsity or delusion in them when he said, "Except a man be born again from above he cannot see or enter into the kingdom of God." He cannot possibly have any godlike or divine goodness and cannot be a child of a heavenly Father with the nature and Spirit of His heavenly Father, without the nature and Spirit of His heavenly Father brought to a real birth of life in him. Without this divine birth, all that we have in us is only fallen Adam; a birth of sin, the flesh and the devil. Logic, learning, and criticism are almost everywhere set in high places to pronounce and prove that being born of the Spirit is mere fanaticism and spiritual frenzy. What wonder is it then, if folly of doctrine, wickedness of life, lusts of the flesh, profaneness of spirit, wantonness of wit, contempt of goodness and profession of Christianity should all seem to have their full establishment among us?

What wonder is it that sacraments, church-prayers and preachings leave high and low, learned and unlearned, men and women, priests and people, as unaltered in all their aged vices as they leave children unchanged in their childish follies? For where men forsake the one and only Fountain of life and goodness, where the seed of the divine birth is not alive and going forward in their spiritual birth, all the difference between man and man is as nothing with respect to the kingdom of God. It matters not what name is given to the old earthly man of Adam's bestial flesh and blood, whether he be called a zealous churchman, a stiff-necked Jew, a polite civilized heathen or a grave infidel--under all these names the unregenerate old man has only one nature regardless of time, place, education, complexion, hypocrisy and worldly wisdom. By such a one, whether he is papist or Protestant, the gospel is only kept as a book and all that is within it is only so much condemnation to the keeper, just as the old Jew has kept the book of the Law and the prophets, only to be more fully condemned by them.

The fact that the Jewish and Christian church stand at this day in the same kind of apostasy and fallen state must be manifest to everyone that does not shut his eyes against it. Why are the Jews in a fallen state? It is because they have refused Him who in His whole process was the truth, the substance, the life and fulfilling of everything that was outwardly taught and prescribed in their Law and prophets. Is it not as easy to see that the whole Christian church is in a fallen state for the same reason, because they are fallen or turned away from that Holy Spirit, who was promised and given to be the only power, life and fulfilling of everything that was taught and prescribed by the gospel? The coming of the Holy Spirit was the same all and fulfilling of the whole gospel as Christ's coming was to the fulfilling of the Law. The Jew with his Old Testament, not owning Christ in all His process to be the Truth and Life and Fulfiller of their Law, is in that same apostasy as the Christian with his New Testament, not owning the Holy Spirit to be his only light guide and governor. All types and figures in the Law were only empty shadows without Christ being the life and power of them. So it is that everything that is written in the gospel is only a dead letter, unless the Holy Spirit in man is the living Reader, the living Rememberer and the living Doer of them in the one who claims to be in Christ. Therefore, where the Holy Spirit is not thus owned and received as the whole power and life of the gospel state, it is no marvel that Christians have no more of the gospel virtues than the Jews have of patriarchal holiness. The same lusts and vices that prospered among the Jews are now found to be breaking forth with as much strength in fallen Christendom. The New Testament, not ending in the coming of the Holy Spirit with fullness of power over sin hell and the devil, is only the same and no better a help to heaven than the Old Testament without the coming of a Messiah.

Need I now say any more to demonstrate the truth of what I first said was the one thing absolutely essential and only available to man's salvation, namely the Spirit of God brought again to His first power of life in us? This was the glory of man's creation and this alone can be the glory of his redemption. Everything besides this that passes for a time between God and man, shows only our fall and distance from God, and in its best state has only the nature of a good road, which is only good because what we want is at the end of it. While God calls us by various outward dispensations, by creaturely things, figurative institutions etc., it is a full proof that we are not in our true state or in that union with God that is intended by our redemption.

God said to Moses, "Put off your shoes for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Now, what God said to Moses is only that very same thing that circumcision, the Law, sacrifices and sacraments say to man. They are in themselves nothing else, just outward significations of inward impurity and lost holiness, and they can do no more in themselves except intimate, point and direct to an inward life and new birth from above that must be sought after.

Here lies the great mistake, or rather, the idolatrous abuse of all God's outward dispensations. These are taken for the thing itself, for the truth and essence of religion. What the learned Jews did with the outward letter of their Law, learned Christians do the same with the outward letter of their gospel. Why did the Jewish church so furiously and obstinately cry out against Christ, "Let Him be crucified"? It was because their letter-learned ears, their worldly spirit, and their temple-orthodoxy would not bear to hear of an inward Savior and not bear to hear of being born again of His Spirit, of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, of His dwelling in them and they in Him. To have their Law of ordinances and their temple-pomp sunk into such a fulfilling Savior as this was such fanatical jargon to their ears that it forced their sober, rational theology to call Christ Beelzebub, His doctrine blasphemy, all for the sake of Moses and rabbinic orthodoxy.

Need it now be asked whether the true Christ of the gospel is less blasphemed or less crucified by a Christian theology that rejects an inward Christ, a Savior living and working in the soul as its inward light and life, generating His own nature and Spirit in it as its only redemption? How could it be that what rejects all this as "mystic madness," could not be that very same old Jewish wisdom, sprung up in Christian theology that said of Christ as He taught these very things, "He is mad! Why listen to Him?" In a parable, our blessed Lord sets forth the blind Jews as saying of Himself, "We will not have this man to reign over us." The sober-minded Christian scholar has none of this Jewish blindness. He only says of Christ, "We will not have this man to reign in us!" So he keeps clear of such mystic absurdity as St. Paul fell into when he enthusiastically said, "... not I, but Christ who lives in me."

Christian doctors reproach the old learned rabbis for their vain faith and carnal desire for a glorious, temporal, outward Christ who should set up their temple-worship all over the world. Vanity indeed and learned blindness infect all the learned who have not been born of the Father. But nevertheless in these condemners of rabbinic blindness, St. Paul's words are remarkably verified, viz., "Wherein you judge another you condemn yourself for you that judges do the same thing." If you take away everything from Christ that Christian doctors call "fanaticism," and claim Him not to be an inward birth, a new life and Spirit within us, but only an outward, separate, distant, heavenly prince who is no more a reality in us than our high cathedrals are in the third heavens, but only by an invisible hand from His throne on high, some way or other, raising and helping great scholars or great temporal powers to make a rock in every nation for His church to stand upon-if all this, the very marrow of modern divinity be true, then you have that very outward Christ and that very outward kingdom which the carnal Jew dreamed of. For the sake of this the spiritual Christ was then nailed to the cross and is still crucified by the new risen Jew in the Christian church.

From where and what comes all this spiritual blindness that mistakes and defeats from age to age all the gracious designs of God towards fallen mankind? Look at the origin of the first sin and you see it all. Had Eve desired no knowledge but what came from God, paradise had been the habitation of her and all her offspring. If after paradise, lost Jews and Christians had desired no knowledge but what came from God, the Law and prophets had kept the Jew close to the first tree of life and the Christian church would have been a kingdom of God and communion of saints to this day.

But now corruption, sin, death and every evil of the world has entered into the church, the spouse of Christ, just as they entered into Eve, the spouse of Adam in paradise, in the same way and from the same cause, viz., a desire of more or other knowledge than what comes from God alone. This desire is the serpent's voice within every man, that does all that to him and in him, that the serpent at the tree did to Eve. It carries on the first deceit; it shows and recommends to him that same beautiful tree of self-will, one's own wit and one's own wisdom, springing up within him, that Eve saw in the garden. So blind is this love of wisdom, as not to see that his eating of it is, in the strictest truth, his eating of the same forbidden fruits as Eve did and keeping up in himself all the death and separation from God that the first hunger for knowledge brought forth.

Let then the eager searcher into words for wisdom, the book-devourer, the opinion-broker, the exalter of human reason and every projecting builder of religious systems be told this: the thirst and pride of being learnedly-wise in the things of God is keeping up the grossest ignorance of them and is nothing else but Eve's old serpent and Eve's evil birth within them. It does no better work in the church of Christ than her thirst after wisdom did in the paradise of God. "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears," is the only way any man ever did or ever can attain divine knowledge and divine goodness. To knock at any other door but this is like asking life of something dead or praying for bread to him who has nothing but stones to give.

Now strange as all this may seem to the labor-learned possessor of far-fetched book-riches, it is saying no more than what Christ said in these words, "Except you be converted and become as little children you cannot enter into the kingdom of God." If classic gospellers, linguists, critics, scripture-logicians, salvation orators, able dealers in the grammatical powers of Hebrew, Greek and Roman phrases, idioms, tropes, figures, etc., can show that by raising themselves high in these attainments, they are the very men that are sunk down from themselves into Christ's little children of the kingdom of God, then it may be also said that he who is laboring, scheming and fighting for all the riches he can get from both the Indies is the very man that has left all to follow Christ, the very man that "labors not for the meat that perishes."

Show me a man whose heart has no desire or prayer in it, but to love God with his whole soul and spirit and his neighbor as himself, then you have shown me the man who knows Christ and is known of Him. Such is the best and wisest man in the world in whom the first paradisiacal wisdom and goodness are come to life. Not a single precept in the gospel is but the precept of his own heart and the joy of the newborn heavenly love that is the life and light of his soul. In this man, everything that came from the old serpent is trod under his feet. Not a spark of self, of pride, of wrath, of envy, of covetousness, or worldly wisdom can have the least abode in him, because the love that fulfills the whole Law and the prophets, that love that is God and Christ, both in angels and men, is the love that gives birth and life and growth to everything that is either thought or word or action in him. If he has no share or part with foolish errors and cannot be tossed about with every wind of doctrine, it is because to be always governed by this love is the same thing as to be always taught of God.

On the other hand, show me a scholar as full of learning as the Vatican is of books, and he will be just as likely to give all that he has for the gospel-pearl as he would be if he was as rich as Croesus. Let no one here imagine that I am writing against all human literature, arts and sciences, or that I wish the world to be without them. I am no more an enemy to them than to the common useful labors of life. It is literal learning, verbal contention, and critical strife about the things of God that I charge with folly and mischief to religion. In this I have all learned Christendom, both popish and Protestant on my side, for they both agree in charging each other with a bad and false gospel-state because of what their learning, logic and criticism do for them. Say not then that it is only the illiterate enthusiast that condemns human learning in the gospel kingdom of God. For when he condemns the blindness and mischief of popish logic and criticism, he has the entire learned Protestant world with him. And when a man lays the same charge to Protestant learning, he has a much larger kingdom of popish great scholars, logically and learnedly, affirming the same thing. The private person charging human learning with so much mischief to the church is so far from being led by fanaticism that he is led by all the church-learning that is in the world.

All learned Christendom is guilty of the same charge against the temporal power in the church, as hurtful to the very being and progress of a salvation-kingdom that is not of this world, by supporting doctrines that human learning has brought into it. And true it is and must be, that human power can only support and help forward human things. The Protestant brings proof from a thousand years' learning and doctrines that the pope is an unjust usurper of temporal power in the church, which is Christ's spiritual spouse. The papist brings the learning of as many ages to show that a temporal head of the church is an anti-Christian usurpation. Yet, he who holds Christ to be the one and only Head, Heart and Life of the church, and that no man can call Jesus Lord but by the Holy Spirit, passes with the learned of both these people for a brain-sick enthusiast. Is it not then high time to look out for some better ground to stand upon than such learning as this?

Now look where you will through all the whole nature of things, no divine wisdom, knowledge, goodness and deliverance from sin are anywhere to be found for fallen man but in these two points: (1) a total entire entrance into the whole process of Christ and, (2) a total resignation to and sole dependence upon the continual operation of the Holy Spirit, Christ come again in the Spirit, to be our never-ceasing Light, Teacher and Guide into all those ways of virtue in which He Himself walked in the flesh. Everything else, call it by what name you will, is but dead works, a vain labor of the old man to newly create himself. And here, let it be well observed that, in these two points consists the whole of that mystic divinity to which a Jewish orthodoxy at this day is so great an enemy. For nothing else is meant or taught by it but a total dying to self (called the process or cross of Christ), that a new creature (called Christ in us or Christ come in the Spirit) may be begotten in the purity and perfection of the first man's union with God.