Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem. The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree. He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit that a building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches, have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [_i.e._ the Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus Christ."[52] His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant. It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments {201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever--while a holy man always has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness, therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward form.[55] In his _Treatise on the Holy Supper_, he wrote: "It is not enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian. For that, there must be _earnestness_. No person is a Christian unless Christ live and work in him."[56]