3. This Nature abhors all it 3. This nature delights only
itself does or omits. in itself and in things of
self.
4. This Nature seeks to lose 4. This nature seeks itself in self. everything.
5. This Nature denies self. 5. This nature cleaves to self.
6. This Nature patiently bears 6. This nature thrusts the the Cross. Cross away.
15. This Nature desires to be 15. This nature desires to be conformed to Christ and equal with God without His Cross in all things. any humility at all.[11]
Christ is thus for Weigel entirely a new order of Being—the Beginner of a new race. Adam had in himself all the possibilities which Christ realized, but the former failed and the latter succeeded and so has become the Head of a divine and heavenly type of humanity. By "a new nativity," a rebirth from above, any man in the world who wills it in living faith may be a recipient of the divine-principle, the Christ-Life, and may thereby be raised to membership in the Kingdom of the Christ-Humanity, which is as far above the Adam-Humanity as the flower is above the soil from which it first sprang. When Christ is formed within and the Humanity which He produces appears in the world, then a new way of living comes into operation. Love is the supreme "sign" of the new type or order. "The man who has the Christ-Life in him does not quarrel; he does not go to law for temporall goods; he does not kill; he lets his coat and cloke go rather than oppose another."[12] "If Christ were of the seed of Adam, He would have the {144} nature and inclinations of Adam. He would hang thieves, behead adulterers, rack murderers with the wheel, kill hereticks, and put corporeally to death all manner of sinners; but now He is tender, kind, loving. He kills no one. The Lamb kills no woolf."[13] Weigel goes the whole bold way in his revolt from legalism, and he accepts the principle of love as a structural principle of the society which Christ is forming in the world: "Where the Life of Christ is, there is no warre made with corporall weapons." "The world wars but Christ doth not so. His warfare is spiritual." "He that maketh warre is no Christian but a woolf, ana belongs not to the sheepfold nor hath he anything to expect of the Kingdom of God, nor may the warrs of the Old Testament, of the time of darknesse serve his turne, for Christians deal not after a Mosaicall, earthly fashion, but they walke in the Life of Christ, without all revenge." "We walk no longer under Moses but under Christ."[14]
The Christian man, however, even with his new "nativity" and with his re-created spirit of love, differs in one respect from Christ. Christ is wholly heavenly, His Nature is woven throughout of spiritual and divine substance. There is no rent nor seam in it. Man, on the other hand, is double, and throughout his temporal period he remains double. By his new "nativity" man can become inwardly spirit though he remains outwardly composed of flesh.[15]
Before the "fall" Adam was unsundered from God. It was sin which made the cleft or rent which separated God and man. Through Christ, the new and heavenly Adam, the junction may be formed again in man's inner self, and once again God and man in us may be unsundered. The flesh is not destroyed, but it ceases to be the dominating factor. It serves now merely as the "habitation" of an invisible spirit, and it exists for the spirit, not the spirit for it.[16] Not only is the body a {145} "habitation" for the Christ-formed soul, but the world now becomes to the enlightened soul an Inn for a transient guest rather than a permanent abiding-place: "like as in an Inne there is meat set before the guest and bedding is allowed to him, even so Christians are in this world guests and their country is above." "It is not fitting for a guest that comes into an Inne, where nothing is his own, that he should appropriate things to himself and quarrel about them!"[17]
As fast as Christ is formed within, as the Life of one's life, the believer attains thereby a peace and a power which make the "rent" between flesh and spirit ever less disturbing, though it still remains until the fleshly tabernacle dissolves. The goal of the spiritual life here on earth is the attainment of "the silent Sabbath of the soul," in which God becomes so completely the soul's sufficiency that the flesh has little scope or sway any more, and there is no longer need of furious struggle against it, "like a serpent between two rocks, trying to pull off his old skin!"[18] In his Heavenly Jerusalem in Us, he says: "It is an attribute of God that He is the Eternal Peace which is longed for by us men, but found by few because they do not mind Christ, who is the Way. God has not grounded either thy Peace or thy Salvation on thy running hither and yon, nor on thy works and thy creaturely activities, but on an inner calm and quiet, on a Sabbath of the soul, in which thou canst hear, with the simple and the tender-minded, what the Lord is saying and doing."[19]
In close conformity to the teaching of Sebastian Franck,[20] Weigel thinks of the Church of God as an invisible Assembly of all true Believers in the entire world, united, not outwardly but inwardly, in the unity of the Spirit and by the bond of Love and Peace. There are for him, as for Franck and other "Spirituals," two kinds of churches: (1) The church composed of a visible group, {146} "to be pointed out with the finger," located in a definite country, allied with a temporal government, held together by a body of doctrine, "tied to" certain sacraments and possessed of force to constrain men, by "carnall perswasions," to conform.[21] Then there is (2) the real Church of God, "the upper Jerusalem," a body visible in no one locality, but dispersed over the earth like wheat in chaff, held together by no declarations of doctrine, tied to no sacraments, dependent on no earthly Lieutenant or Vice-gerent, and on no university-trained Doctors, which recognizes Prince and Ploughman alike, and secures its unity through Christ and through the invisible cement of Love. "To this Assembly," writes Weigel, "doe I stick; in this holy Church doe I rejoice to be. . . . Jesus Christ is my Head, my Teacher. He is everywhere with me and in me, and I in Him. Although the Protestants should chase me amongst Papists or Atheists, yet I should still be in the holy Church and should have all the heavenly Gifts common to all Believers, and although the Papists should banish me into Turkey, yet even there should I be in the holy Church."[22]