Like all this group of thinkers to whom he is kindred, Sterry makes a sharp contrast between the Spirit and the letter, between what happens within the soul and what is external to it. The early stage of religion is characterized by externals, and only after long processes of tutorship and discipline does the soul learn how to live by the Seed of life and Light of truth within. The early stage is legalistic, during which the person is "hedged about" with promises and threats, "walled in" with laws and ordinances, "living in a perpetual alarm of fears," "shut up to rules, retirements and forms"--but it is far better to serve God from fear and by outward rules than not to serve Him at all. The true way of progress is to move up from fear and law to love and freedom, and from outward rules to the discovery of a central Light of God, a Heavenly Image, in the deeps of {286} one's own spirit--"real knowledge comes when the Day Star rises in the heart."[63] We pass from "notions" and "words" to an inward power and a bubbling joy. He calls the period of law and letter a "baby-stage," "when we see truth as blear-eyed beholders." Legal religion compared with the religion of the Spirit is "like a spark struck from flint at midnight" compared with the sun; it is like "drawing the waters of Grace, a bucketful at a time," when we might have "the Spirit gushing as a living and perpetual Fountain."[64] But God is so good that He speaks to us in a variety of ways, and He lets us "spell His name" with the alphabet, until we learn to know His own Voice. Nature, in the elements of visible creation, tells us of Him; Reason compels us to recognize One who is First and Best, the All in all; the written word cries in our ears that God is Love; but above these voices there is a Principle within our own souls by which "God propagates His Life" in us, and he who, in this love-way, has become a son knows God as _Abba-Father_.[65] We pray now with power, when this new Life of the Spirit has come into us, and we pour our spirits out in self-forgetfulness, "as a River pours itself into the sea, where it loseth its own name and is known only as the waters of the Sea."[66] He is always gentle in his account of other religions and other stages of faith, and he sees good in all types, if only they help the soul to hunger for the Eternal and do not cramp it. "O that I had a hundred mouths," he writes, "an hundred tongues, a Voice like the Voice of God that rends Rocks, to cry to all sorts of Persons and Spirits in this Land and in all the Christian World through the whole creation: 'Let all that differ in Principles, Professions, Opinions and Forms, see the good there is in each other'!"[67]