we are so much more at home with Behmen, the prodigal son, than we are

with Behmen, the theosophical theologian.  When Behmen begins to teach us to pray, and when the lesson comes to us out of his own closet, then we are able to see in a nearer light something of the originality, the greatness, the strength, and the true and genuine piety of the philosopher and the theologian.  When Behmen’s philosophy and theology become penitence, prayer, and praise, then by their fruits we know how good his philosophy and his theology must be, away down in their deepest and most hidden nature.  I agree with Walton that those prayers are full of unction and instruction, and that some of them are of the ‘highest magnetical power’; and that, as rendered into modern phraseology, they are most beautiful devotional compositions, and very models of all that a divinely illuminated mind would address

to God and Christ.  For myself, immediately after the Psalms of David I put Jacob Behmen’s Holy Week and the prayers scattered up and down through his True Repentance, and beside Behmen I put Bishop Andrewes’ Private Devotions.  I have discovered no helps to my own devotional life for a moment to set beside Behmen and Andrewes.

A Treatise on Baptism and the Lord’s Supper; A Key to the Principal Points and Expressions in the Author’s Writings; and then a most valuable volume of letters—Epistolae Theosophicae—complete the extraordinarily rich bibliography of the illuminated and blessed Jacob Behmen.

Though there is a great deal of needless and wearisome repetition in Jacob Behmen’s writings, at the same time there is scarcely a single subject in the whole range of theology on which he does not throw a new, an

intense, and a brilliant light.  In his absolutely original and magnificent doctrine of God, while all the time loyally true to it, Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians.  The Reformers concentrated their criticism upon the anthropology and soteriology of the Church of Rome, and especially upon the discipline and worship connected therewith.  They saw no need for recasting any of the more fundamental positions of pure theology.  And while Jacob Behmen, broadly speaking, accepts as his own confession of faith all that Luther and Calvin and their colleagues taught on sin and salvation, on the corruption and guilt of sinners, and on the redeeming work of

our Lord, he rises far above the greatest and best of his teachers in his doctrine of the Godhead.  Not only does he rise far higher in that doctrine than either Rome or Geneva, he rises far higher and sounds far deeper than either Antioch, or Alexandria, or Nicomedia, or Nice.  On this profound point Bishop Martensen has an excellent appreciation of Behmen.  After what I have taken upon me to say about Behmen, the learned Bishop’s authoritative passage must be quoted:—‘If we compare Behmen’s doctrine of the Trinity,’ says the learned and evangelical Bishop, ‘with that which is contained in the otherwise so admirable Athanasian Creed, the latter but displays to us a most abstruse metaphysic; a God for mere thought, and in whom there is nothing sympathetic for the heart of man.  Behmen, on the

contrary, reveals to us the Living God, the God of Goodness, the Eternal Love, of which there is absolutely no hint whatever in the hard Athanasian symbol.  By this attitude of his to the affections of the human heart, Behmen’s doctrine of the Trinity is in close coherence with the Reformation, and with its evangelical churches. . . . Behmen is anxious to state a conception of God that will fill the hiatus between the theological and anthropological sides of the dogmatical development which was bequeathed by the Reformation; he seeks to unite the theological and the anthropological. . . . From careful study of Behmen’s theology,’ continues Bishop Martensen, ‘one gains a prevailing impression that Behmen’s God is, in His inmost Being, most kindred to man, even as man in his inmost being is still kindred to God.  And, besides, we recognise in Behmen

throughout the pulse-beat of a believing man, who is in all his books supremely anxious about his own salvation and that of his fellow-men.’  Now, it is just this super-confessional element in Behmen, both on his speculative and on his practical side, taken along with the immediate and intensely practical bearing of all his speculations, it is just this that is Behmen’s true and genuine distinction, his shining and unshared glory.  And it is out of that supreme, solitary, and wholly untrodden field of Behmen’s super-confessional theology that all that is essential, characteristic, distinctive, and fruitful in Behmen really and originally springs.  The distinctions he takes within, and around, and immediately beneath the Godhead, are of themselves full of the noblest light.  The Divine Nature, Eternal Nature, Temporal Nature,

Human Nature, when evolved out of one another, and when related to one another, as Behmen sees them evolved and related, are categories of the clearest, surest, most necessary, and most intensely instructive kind.  And if the height and the depth, the massiveness, the stupendousness, and the grandeur, as well as the sweetness, and the beauty, and the warmth, and the fruitfulness of a doctrine of God is any argument or evidence of its truth, then Behmen’s magnificent doctrine of the Godhead is surely proved to demonstration and delight.  God is the Essence of all Essences to Behmen.  God is the deepest Ground, the living and the life-giving Root of all existence.  At the same time, the Divine Nature is so Divine; It is so high and so deep; It is so unlike all that is not Itself; It is so beyond and above all language, and

all thought, and all imagination of man or angel, that universe after universe have had to come into existence, and have had to be filled, each successive universe after its own kind, with all the fulness of God, before that universe of which we form a part, and to which our utmost imagination is confined, could have come into existence, and into recognition of itself.  Behmen’s Eternal Nature must never be taken for the Eternal God.  The Divine Nature, the Eternal Godhead, exists in the Father, in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost; and then, after the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost, there comes up in order of existence Eternal Nature.  Eternal Nature is not the Divine Nature, but it is as near to the Divine Nature in its qualities and in its powers as any created

thing can ever by any possibility be.  Now, if we are still to follow Behmen, we must not let ourselves indolently think of the production of Eternal Nature as a divine act done and