I've Found a Historical Soulmate! :)

writing by Eberhard Arnold. (http://www.plough.com/ebooks/pdfs/EberhardArnold.pdf)

Do not be surprised that I talk with you as if you were still right with me. For what does the present know of what is yonder? You are not dead; no, you are alive in the Spirit...

And now we are together again, my friend, at Sannerz, in the Rhön, and in my study on the banks of the Neckar:

The people come and go, young and old, looking for refuge in their need. They are wrapped up in themselves, unnatural, cramped and stiffened, exaggerated, without a goal beyond themselves. And yet your house has an open door; no one is first asked who he is...

We work in the fields and in the house. Together we toil for an understanding of the people and events around us. I see the roguish glint in your eyes, your mischievous smile and waggish beard, your cheerful laugh when the peculiarities of human life force themselves upon us. We are often wearied with dull, commonplace talk, but we also laugh freely and heartily, in gales of truly Homeric laughter...

That was your gift. Your wit was pithy, but free of poisonous hypocrisy. You had no love for stuffiness or sweetness. About you there was no penetrating smell of “Christianity,” no cliquishness, no sentimentality. To seek out heretics was just as foreign to you as was the addiction to straighten out everyone according to your own way. You valued other people as long as they were earnest, and you came to terms with the insincere. You found a way with the most pigheaded peasant and with the most stubborn “man of God.” You were a brother to them when they needed you, and your manner was at all times cheerful, genuinely animated by trust.

You lived life from the center and from the depths. You did not inherit Christ from others, but from out of your own inner experience and encounter. You were one who was truly freed by Christ, who was changed by him. You were free of anxiety. Your faith was no mere acceptance of truths, no flight of fear, but certainty. And therefore there was nothing of conventional Christianity in you, for you knew precisely that Christ was no “Christian.”
You opposed all appearance, all posturing and all self-righteousness. You were not concerned with dogma, but rather with the life of Christ, with the community of brothers and sisters in the sense of the primitive church.

You took humanity for what it is. You were as distant from illusion as from misunderstanding. You knew demonic powers and the weight of the age, but these things came to you not in isolated recognition, but as a binding call to help your brothers.
You knew the power of the church community within the great current of a completely different world. But you never recruited. Whoever was called, heard, and thus came to you; some to live with you and your friends in community; others, touched by your insight, to remain as good friends...

Let me embrace you, my friend! You are present - a witness of the new life in Christ; a man of kindness, a friend of freedom, a brother of knowing love - but yet one of such decisiveness that you discern and separate spirits.