not born of art, but of simplicity.  We acknowledge all who love such knowledge as our brethren in Christ, with whom we hope to rejoice eternally in the heavenly school.  For our best knowledge here is but in part, but when we shall attain to perfection, then we shall see what God is, and what He can do.  Amen.’

A Treatise of the Incarnation of the Son of God comes next, and then we have three smaller works written to clear up

and to establish several difficult and disputed matters in it and in some of his former works.  To write on the Incarnation of the Son of God would need, says Behmen, an angel’s pen; but his defence is that his is better than any angel’s pen, because it is the pen of a sinner’s love.  The year 1621 saw one of Behmen’s most original and most powerful books finished,—the Signatura Rerum.  In this remarkable book Behmen teaches us that all things have two worlds in which they live,—an inward world and an outward.  All created things have an inner and an invisible essence, and an outer and a visible form.  And the outward form is always more or less the key to the inward character.  This whole world that we see around us, and of which we ourselves are the soul,—it is all a symbol, a ‘signature,’ of an invisible world. 

This deep principle runs through the whole of creation.  The Creator went upon this principle in all His work; and the thoughtful mind can see that principle coming out in all His work,—in plants, and trees, and beasts.

As German Boehme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed—
Colloquized with the cowslips on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.

But, best of all, this principle comes out clearest in the speech, behaviour, features, and face of a man.  Every day men are signing themselves from within.  Every act they perform, every word they speak, every wish they entertain,—it all comes out and is fixed for ever in their character, and even in their appearance.  ‘Therefore,’ says Behmen in the beginning of his book, ‘the greatest

understanding lies in the signature.  For by the external form of all creatures; by their voice and action, as well as by their instigation, inclination, and desire, their hidden spirit is made known.  For Nature has given to everything its own language according to its innermost essence.  And this is the language of Nature, in which everything continually speaks, manifests, and declares itself for what it is,—so much so, that all that is spoken or written even about God, however true, if the writer or speaker has not the Divine Nature within himself, then all he says is dumb to me; he has not got the hammer in his hand that can strike my bell.’

The Way to Christ was Behmen’s next book, and in the four precious treatises that compose that book our author takes an altogether new departure.  In

his Aurora, in The Three Principles, in the Forty Questions, and in the Signatura Rerum, Jacob Behmen has been writing for philosophers and theologians.  Or, if in all these works he has been writing for a memorial to himself in the first place,—even then, it has been for himself on the philosophical and theological side of his own mind.  But in The Way to Christ he writes for himself under that character which, once taken up by Jacob Behmen, is never for one day laid down.  Behmen’s favourite Scripture, after our Lord’s promise of the Holy Spirit to them that ask for Him, was the parable of the Prodigal Son.  In all his books Behmen is that son, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but at last beginning to come to himself and to return to his Father.  The Way to Christ is a production of the very greatest depth

and strength, but it is the depth and the strength of the heart and the conscience rather than the depth and the strength of the understanding and the imagination.  This nobly evangelical book is made up of four tracts, entitled respectively, Of True Repentance, Of True Resignation, Of Regeneration, and Of the Supersensual Life.  And a deep vein of autobiographic life and interest runs through the four tracts and binds them into a quick unity.  ‘A soldier,’ says Behmen, ‘who has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight.’  And neither Augustine nor Luther nor Bunyan carries deeper wounds, or broader scars, nor tells a nobler story in any of their autobiographic and soldierly books than Behmen does in his Way to Christ.  At the commencement of The True Repentance he promises us that he will write of a process

or way on which he himself has gone.  ‘The author herewith giveth thee the best jewel that he hath.’  And a true jewel it is, as the present speaker will testify.  If The True Repentance has a fault at all it is the fault of Rutherford’s Letters.  For the taste of some of his readers Behmen, like Rutherford, draws rather too much on the language and the figures of the married life in setting forth the love of Christ to the espoused soul, and the love of the espoused soul to Christ.  But with that, and all its other drawbacks, The True Repentance is such a treatise that, once discovered by the proper reader, it will be the happy discoverer’s constant companion all his earthly and penitential days.  As the English reader is carried on through the fourth tract, The Supersensual Life, he experiences a new and an increasing sense of ease and pleasure, combined

with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in Behmen’s books.  The new height and depth and inwardness are all Jacob Behmen’s own; but the freedom and the ease and the movement and the melody are all William Law’s.  In his preparations for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated and paraphrased The Supersensual Life, and the editor of the 1781 edition of Behmen’s works has incorporated Law’s beautiful rendering of that tract in room of John Sparrow’s excellent but rather too antique rendering.  We are in John Sparrow’s everlasting debt for the immense labour he laid out on Behmen, as well as for his own deep piety and personal worth.  But it was service enough and honour enough for Sparrow to have Englished Jacob Behmen at all

for his fellow-countrymen, even if he was not able to English him as William Law would have done.  But take Behmen and Law together, as they meet together in The Supersensual Life, and not A Kempis himself comes near them even in his own proper field, or in his immense service in that field.  There is all the reality, inwardness, and spirituality of The Imitation in The Supersensual Life, together with a sweep of imagination, and a grasp of understanding, as well as with both a sweetness and a bitterness of heart that even A Kempis never comes near.  The Supersensual Life of Jacob Behmen, in the English of William Law, is a superb piece of spiritual work,