Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/265

 in body, in consequence of the fall, it must be through a new birth, without which, Christ says, we cannot enter the kingdom of God."

It is evident that what Hübmaier sought was escape from the paralysing Augustinianism of Luther; and he attempted to work out a theory that should make a reality and not an empty form of the preaching of the gospel. This he believed he had secured by making the spirit an unwilling partner in the sin of Adam, and therefore exempted in a measure from the results of sin. Hence, while the will of the body and the will of the soul are no longer free, the will of the spirit is free. It is only so that deliverance from his sinful state is possible to man, through the hearing of the gospel, as he goes on to argue at length:

"'But the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged by no man' (1 Cor. ii., 14, 15). Here you see, Christian reader, the perfection of the human spirit, since it judges all things, even the wounds of the soul. Likewise you see that the body and the soul are severely wounded, and that the spirit only has