Luther himself was always impressed with the lack of real, intense, personal religion which resulted from the Reformation movement, and he often bewailed this lack. He said once to Schwenckfeld in this early period, "Dear Caspar, genuine Christians are none too common. I wish I could see two together in a place!" But with all his titanic power to shake the old Church, Luther was not able to sift away the accumulated chaff of the ages and to seize upon the inward, living kernel of Christ's Gospel in such a real and vivid presentation that men were once again able to find the entire Christ, and were once again lifted into apostolic power through the discovery of Him. This was the task to which Schwenckfeld now felt himself summoned. It seemed to him that the entire basis of salvation should be grasped in a way quite different from Luther's way of formulation, and this called for a restatement of the whole revelation of God in Christ and of the work of Christ in the soul of man.[7]
Luther's final break with the spiritual Reformer of Silesia, which occurred in 1527, was primarily occasioned by Schwenckfeld's teaching on the meaning and value of the Lord's Supper, though their difference was by no means confined to that point. Schwenckfeld's position had culminated in 1526 in a suspension of the celebration of the Lord's Supper--the so-called _Stillstand_--until a right understanding and true practice of it according to the will of the Lord should be revealed.[8] "We know at present of no apostolic commission," he wrote, "nor { 68} again do we make any claim to be regarded as apostles, for we have neither received the fulness of the Holy Spirit nor the apostolic seal for such an office. We dwell in humility and ascribe nothing to ourselves, except that we bear witness to Christ, invite men to Christ, preach Christ and His infinite work of salvation, and labour as much as we can that Christ may be truly known."[9]
Into the bitter controversy over the Sacrament--a controversy between noble and sincere Reformers, which forms the supreme internal tragedy of the Reformation--we need not now enter. We shall in the proper place give Schwenckfeld's position upon it, though only in so far as it belongs in an exposition of his type of spiritual Christianity; but the immediate effect of his position and practices was such a collision with Luther, and the arousal of such hostility on the part of the Lutherans of Silesia, that the continued pursuit of Schwenckfeld's mission in that country became impossible. He was, however, not expelled by edict, but under compulsion of the existing situation; and in order not to be a trouble to his friend, the Duke of Liegnitz, he went in 1529 into voluntary exile, never to return. For thirty years he was a wanderer without a permanent home on the earth, but he could thank his Lord Christ, as he did, for granting him through all these years an inward freedom, and for bringing him into "His castle of Peace." He once wrote: "If I had wanted a good place on earth, if I had cared more for temporal than for eternal things, and if I would have deserted my Christ, then I might have stayed in my fatherland and in my own house, and I might have had the powerful of this world for my friends."[10]