But as those years went on it came to be with him, to use his own words, as with so much grain that has been buried in the earth, and which, in spite of storms and tempests, will, out of its own life, spring up, and that even when reason says it is now winter, and that all hope and all power is gone.  And thus it was that, under the same instigation which had produced the Aurora, Behmen at a rush wrote his very fine if very difficult book, The Three Principles of the Divine Essence.  He calls The Three Principles his A B C, and the easiest of all his books.  And William Law recommends all beginners in Behmen to read alone for some sufficient time the tenth and twelfth chapters of The Three Principles.  I shall let Behmen describe

the contents of his easiest book in his own words.  ‘In this second book,’ he says, ‘there is declared what God is, what Nature is, what the creatures are, what the love and meekness of God are, what God’s will is, what the wrath of God is, and what joy and sorrow are.  As also, how all things took their beginning: with the true difference between eternal and transitory creatures.  Specially of man and his soul, what the soul is, and how it is an eternal creature.  Also what heaven is, wherein God and the holy angels and holy men dwell, and hell wherein the devils dwell: and how all things were originally created and had their being.  In sum, what the Essence of all Essences is.  And thus I commit my reader to the sweet love of God.’  The Three Principles, according to Christopher Walton, was the first book of Behmen’s

that William Law ever held in his hand.  That, then, was the title-page, and those were the contents, that threw that princely and saintly mind into such a sweat.  It was a great day for William Law, and through him it was, and will yet be acknowledged to have been, a great day for English theology when he chanced, at an old bookstall, upon The Three Principles, Englished by a Barrister of the Inner Temple.  The picture of that bookstall that day is engraven in lines of light and love on the heart of every grateful reader of Jacob Behmen and of William Law’s later and richer and riper writings.

In three months after he had finished The Three Principles, Behmen had composed a companion treatise, entitled The Threefold Life of Man.  Modest about himself as Behmen always was, he could not be wholly blind about

his own incomparable books.  And he but spoke the simple truth about his third book when he said of it—as, indeed, he was constantly saying about all his books—that it will serve every reader just according to his constellation, his inclination, his disposition, his complexion, his profession, and his whole condition.  ‘You will be soon weary of all contentious books,’ he wrote to Casper Lindern, ‘if you entertain and get The Threefold Life of Man into your mind and heart.’  ‘The subject of regeneration,’ says Christopher Walton, ‘is the pith and drift of all Behmen’s writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of The Threefold Life, which appear to have been in great favour with Mr. Law.’

Behmen’s next book was a very extraordinary piece of work, and it had a

very extraordinary origin.  A certain Balthazar Walter, who seems to have been a second Paracelsus in his love of knowledge and in his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, had, like Paracelsus, travelled east, and west, and north, and south in search of that ancient and occult wisdom of which so many men in that day dreamed.  But Walter, like his predecessor Paracelsus, had come home from his travels a humbler man, a wiser man, and a man more ready to learn and lay to heart the truth that some of his own countrymen could all the time have taught him.  On his return from the east, Walter found the name of Jacob Behmen in everybody’s mouth; and, on introducing himself to that little shop in Goerlitz out of which the Aurora and The Threefold Life had come, Walter was wise enough to see and bold enough to confess that he had found a teacher

and a friend there such as neither Egypt nor India had provided him with.  After many immensely interested visits to Jacob Behmen’s workshop, Walter was more than satisfied that Behmen was all, and more than all, that his most devoted admirers had said he was.  And, accordingly, Walter laid a plan so as to draw upon Behmen’s profound and original mind for a solution of some of the philosophical and theological problems that were agitating and dividing the learned men of that day.  With that view Walter made a round of the leading universities of Germany, conversed with the professors and students, collected a long list of the questions that were being debated in that day in those seats of learning, and sent the list to Behmen, asking him to give his mind to them and try to answer them.  ‘Beloved sir,’ wrote Behmen, after three months’

meditation and prayer, ‘and my good friend: it is impossible for the mind and reason of man to answer all the questions you have put to me.  All those things are known to God alone.  But, that no man may boast, He sometimes makes use of very mean men to make known His truth, that it may be seen and acknowledged to come from His own hand alone.’  It is told that when Charles the First read the English translation of Behmen’s answers to the Forty Questions, he wrote to the publisher that if Jacob Behmen was no scholar, then the Holy Ghost was still with men; and, if he was a learned man, then his book was one of the best inventions that had ever been written.  The Forty Questions ran through many editions both on the Continent and in England, and it was this book that gained for Jacob Behmen the denomination

of the Teutonic Philosopher, a name by which he is distinguished among authors to this day.  The following are some of the university questions that Balthazar Walter took down and sent to Jacob Behmen for his answer: ‘What is the soul of man in its innermost essence, and how is it created, soul by soul, in the image of God?  Is the soul propagated from father to son like the body? or is it every time new created and breathed in from God?  How comes original sin into each several soul?  How does the soul of the saint feed and grow upon the word of God?  Whence comes the deadly contrariety between the flesh and the spirit?  Whither goes the soul when it at death departs from the body?  In what does its rest, its awakening, and its glorification consist?  What kind of body shall the glorified body be?  The soul and

spirit of Christ, what are they? and are they the same as ours?  What and where is Paradise?’  Through a hundred and fourteen large quarto pages Behmen’s astonishing answers to the forty questions run; after which he adds this:  ‘Thus, my beloved friend, we have set down, according to our gifts, a round answer to your questions, and we exhort you as a brother not to despise us.  For we are