Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 23

Here, then, were two very enthusiastic disciples of Boehme who took their master's teaching very seriously, who on the whole grasped its essential meaning, were possessed and penetrated by the _idea_ of a deeper eternal world manifesting itself in the temporal, and who gave their lives to the difficult task of making Boehme's message {220} available to their own people and to their own perplexed age. They were not "occultists." They did not run into enthusiastic vapourings, nor did they strain after psychic experiences which would relieve them of the stress and strain of achieving the goal of life through the formation of balanced character and the practice of social virtues, though, as we shall see, some of the readers of their translations took the risky course, and ended in the fog rather than in the clear light.

The question has naturally been raised whether Boehme exercised any direct influence upon the early Quaker movement.[31] There is at present no way of proving that George Fox, the chief exponent of the movement, had actually read the writings of the Teutonic philosopher or had consciously absorbed the views of the latter, but there are so many marks of influence apparent in the _Journal_ that no careful student of both writers can doubt that there was some sort of influence, direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious. The works of Boehme were, as we have seen, all available in English, during the great formative period of Fox's life, from 1647 to 1661. There can be no question that they were read by the serious _Seekers_ in the period of the Commonwealth.

Thomas Taylor, who was one of the finest fruits of the Seeker movement, bears in 1659 a positive testimony to the spiritual value of Jacob Bewman's (Behmen) writings. Taylor received a letter from Justice William Thornton of Hipswell in Yorkshire, warning him to beware of "the confused Notions and great words of Jacob Bewman and such like frothy scriblers." Taylor replies: "For thy light expressions of Jacob Bewman, I know in most things he speaks a Parable to thee yet, and so his writings may well be lightly esteemed of by thee; but there is that in his Writings which, if ever thy eye be opened, will appear to be a sweet unfolding of the Mystery of G.o.d and of Christ, in divers particulars, according to his Gift. And therefore beware of speaking Evil of that which thou {221} know'st not."[32] We have also seen how Boehme appealed to such n.o.ble Seekers as Charles and Durant Hotham, John Sparrow, and John Ellistone.[33] One Quaker of some importance, Francis Ellington, not only read the writings of Boehme, but regarded "that Faithful Servant Jacob Behme" as "a Prophet of the Lord."[34] He quotes from his German "Prophet" the words: "A Lilly blossometh to you ye Northern Countries; if you destroy it not with sectarian contention of the learned, then it will become a great Tree among you, but if you shall rather contend than to know the true G.o.d, then the Ray pa.s.seth by and hitteth only some; and then afterwards you shall be forced to draw water for the thirst of your souls among strange nations." Ellington regards Boehme as a genuine "prophet," and the "Lilly" that was to blossom in the North seems to Ellington plainly to be George Fox and his Quaker Society, which the learned have tried in vain to overthrow.

He cites many pa.s.sages from the Teutonic Prophet of the Lord to show the parallelism between the prophesied type of spiritual religion and the Children of the Light who have exactly fulfilled it.[35]

It would be natural to expect that the young Quaker seeker, eager for any light on his dark path, would read the _Forty Questions_ and _The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_, or at least that he would hear them discussed by the people among whom he moved in these intense and eventful years. In any case there are ideas expressed and experiences described in the _Journal_ which look strangely like memories, conscious or subconscious, of ideas and experiences to be found in the Boehme writings. The most striking single pa.s.sage is one which describes an experience which occurred to Fox in 1648. It is as follows: "Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of G.o.d. All things were {222} new; and all the Creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and innocency and righteousness, being renewed into the image of G.o.d by Jesus Christ, to the state of Adam before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me how all things had their names given them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practise physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtue of things were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . The admirable works of creation and the virtues thereof may be known through the openings of that divine Word of Wisdom and power by which they were made."[36]

Jacob Boehme had, as we have seen, a similar experience of having "the nature and virtues of things opened" to him in the year 1600. The following account of it was given in Sparrow's Introduction to _Forty Questions_, printed in 1647: "He went forth into the fields and there perceived the wonderful or wonder works of the Creator in the signatures, shapes, figures, and qualities or properties of all created things very clearly and plainly laid open. Whereupon he was filled with exceeding joy." The same incident is told in a slightly different way in Justice Hotham's _Life of Behmen_: "Going abroad into the Fields, to a Green before Neys-Gate, at Gorlitts, he there sate down, and viewing the Herbs and Gra.s.s of the Field, in his Inward Light he saw into their essences, use and properties." It was, further, a fundamental idea of Boehme's that the outward and visible world is a parable and symbol of the spiritual world within, and that by a spiritual experience which carries the soul down to the inner, hidden, abysmal Centre, the secrets and mysteries of the outward creation may become revealed. Hotham says that Boehme, by his divine Light, "beheld the whole of creation, and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote his book _De signatura rerum_."[37] Ellistone, in the Introduction to Boehme's _Epistles_, printed in 1649, predicts {223} that an experience, like this one which Fox claimed, will come to those who receive the inner Divine Light. "This knowledge," he says, "must advance all Arts and Sciences and conduce to the attainment of the Universal Tincture and Signature, whereby the different secret qualities and vertues that are hid in all visible and corporeall things, as Metals, Minerals, Plants and Herbes, may be drawne forth and applied to their right naturall use _for the curing and healing_ of corrupt and decayed nature."[38]

It was also a feature of Boehme's teaching that man must enter again into Paradise and return to the condition of the unfallen Adam. "The n.o.ble Virgin" [_i.e._ Sophia or Spiritual Wisdom], Boehme writes, "showeth us the Gate and how we must enter again into Paradise through the sharpness of the sword," which, in a few lines previous, he calls "the flaming sword which G.o.d set to keep the Tree of Life."[39] Fox's experience of the "new smell" of creation is an even more striking parallel. Mystic awakenings and spiritual openings generally impress the recipient of them with a sense of new and fresh penetration into the meaning of things and leave them with a feeling of heightened powers, but cases in which the experience results in a new sense of _smell_ are fairly rare. Two persons might, no doubt, have such an experience quite independently, but one who has become familiar with the range of _suggestion_ in experiences of this type will note with interest the large place which "new Smells and Odours" occupy in Boehme's writings. For example, he says, in the _Signatura rerum_, where he describes the coming of the Paradise-experience: "When Paradise springs up, the paradisaical joy puts itself forth with a lovely smell,"[40] and in one of his Epistles he speaks of a spiritual awakening in his own life that was marked by a new smell--"A very strong Odour was given to me in the life of G.o.d."[41]

There is another pa.s.sage in Fox's _Journal_, a few lines {224} beyond this famous account of his Paradise-experience, that also bears the mark of Boehme's influence. In fact, it is difficult to believe that Fox could have got his phraseology anywhere else than from Boehme. The pa.s.sage reads: "As people come into subjection to the Spirit of G.o.d and grow up in the Image and Power of the Almighty, they may receive the _Word of Wisdom that opens all things, and, come to know the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being_."[42] Everywhere in Boehme it is "Sophia, the Word of Wisdom," that "opens all things," and the goal of all spiritual experience and of all divine illumination for him consists in coming to "the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being, or the Eternal Essence." That is not a Biblical phrase, and it is not one which the Drayton youth would have heard from native English sources. It came to England with the Boehme literature. Further revelations along this same line of "opening" follow in the _Journal_. In the Vale of Beavor the Lord "opened" things to Fox, relating to "the three great professions in the world, physic, divinity and law." "He showed me,"

Fox says, "that the physicians were out of the Wisdom of G.o.d by which the creatures were made, and so knew not their virtue because they were _out of the Word of Wisdom_." He saw that the priests were actuated by _the dark power_--a very suspicious phrase to one who knows what a place the "Dark Principle" holds in Boehme's writings--and he saw that the lawyers were out of the Wisdom of G.o.d. But it was opened to him that all these three professions might be "reformed" and "brought into the Wisdom of G.o.d by which all things were created," and "have a right understanding of the virtues of things through the Word of Wisdom"; for "in the Light all things may be seen both visible and invisible."[43]

The extraordinary use of Old Testament figures, by which Fox ill.u.s.trates the condition of the Church, in the section of the _Journal_ following the pa.s.sages above quoted, is no less significant.

The figures of Cain and Esau, of Korah and Balaam, and the types of Adam and Moses are given {225} quite in the style of _The Three Principles_, or of the _Mysterium magnum_.[44] One parallel is especially interesting. Fox says: "I saw plainly that none could read Moses aright without Moses' spirit, by which Moses saw how man was in the Image of G.o.d in Paradise, and how he fell and how death came over him, and how all men have been under this death."[45] The Preface to _Mysterium magnum_ says: "I cannot but think that the same G.o.d that taught Moses so eminently by His Spirit had so fitted the people for whom he wrote that they were capable to receive instruction by his words."[46] This idea, so frequently expressed in the writings of Fox, that no one can understand the Scriptures except by the Spirit that gave forth the Scriptures,[47] is equally a fundamental idea of Boehme and his English interpreters. In many pa.s.sages of the _Mysterium magnum_ Boehme declares that the written word is only a witness to the living Word, which latter Word can be understood only by those who are in the Spirit that spoke in the Prophets and Apostles.[48] Sparrow, in his Introduction to the _Aurora_, declares that no person can understand the spiritual mystery of redemption, "though he reade of it in the Scriptures," unless the Holy Spirit in himself, the true Divine Light, enlighten him, and give him the word of faith in his heart; "neither," he adds, "can any understand the Holy Scriptures but by the same Gifts of the Holy Spirit in the Soul."[49]

On one occasion the Lord showed Fox the nature of things that are in the human heart--"as the nature of dogs, swine, vipers, etc."[50] So, too, Boehme saw that there are many kinds of wild beast in man's nature--the lion, the wolf, the dog, the fox, and the serpent.[51] Fox frequently speaks of the two "seeds"--the Seed of G.o.d or the Seed of Christ and the seed of the serpent--and the victory of life in the Spirit consists in having the Seed of G.o.d conquer the seed of the serpent, or, as Fox {226} often expresses it, having "the Seed of G.o.d bruise the serpent's head," or having "the Seed of G.o.d atop of the devil and all his works"; or having "the Seed reign."[52] This phraseology runs throughout Boehme's writings. The two "seeds" are everywhere in evidence, and "the Treader on the serpent" is the frequent name for Christ and for the victorious soul. G.o.d showed Adam, Boehme says, how "the Treader on the serpent" should once again be brought with virtue and power up into the Paradise of G.o.d, and live anew by the Word of G.o.d.[53]

Fox, in the account of his first great transforming opening in 1647, says: "I knew G.o.d by revelation as one who hath the key doth open."[54]

This is a frequent figure in Boehme for a first-hand experience.

"Where is Paradise to be found?" he asks. "Is it far away or is it near? One person cannot lend the key to another. Every one must unlock it with his own key or else he cannot enter,"[55] and again he describes that "surpa.s.sing joy of the new regeneration," when the soul "gets the keys of the kingdom of heaven and may open for itself."[56]

Fox's "openings" about university-trained ministers and his references to "stone churches," or "churches of stone and mortar," have many parallels in Boehme. Dinah of the Old Testament, for example, is "nothing else but a figure of our stone churches and our colleges with their ministers!" and Jacob's concubine, again, "signifieth nothing else but the stone churches in which G.o.d's word and testament are handled."[57]

Finally, Fox's great vision of an ocean of Darkness and an ocean of Light, while no doubt a real experience and expressed in his own words, is profoundly like Boehme's fundamental insight that there are two world-principles of Light and Darkness, and that Light is, in the end, victorious over Darkness.[58]

No attempt has been made to gather an exhaustive set {227} of parallels between the experiences and ideas of these two religious teachers.

Enough, however, is presented to show that this spiritual leader in England was distinctly a debtor to the Teutonic seer who died the same year in which the former was born. Fox himself never mentions Boehme by name, nor does he ever refer to the little sect of "Behmenists,"

which, springing into existence contemporaneously with the birth of the Quaker movement, had an interesting, though short-lived, history; but a number of the followers of Fox went aggressively into the lists against their puny rival.

The so-called "sect of Behmenists" is thus described by Richard Baxter: "The fifth sect are the Behmenists whose opinions go much toward the way of the former [the Quakers] for the sufficiency of the Light of Nature, Inward Light, the salvation of the Heathen as well as Christians, and a dependence on 'revelations.' But they are fewer in number, and seem to have attained to greater Meekness and conquest of pa.s.sions than any of the rest. Their doctrines are to be seen in Jacob Behmen's Books, by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood!"[59]

"The chiefest" of this "sect of Behmenists," Baxter says, was Dr. John Pordage. Pordage was born in 1607; was curate in 1644 of St.

Lawrence's in Reading; was made rector of the Church in Bradfield late in 1646; was charged in 1651 with heresies, comprised in nine articles, consisting apparently of a sort of mystical pantheism. He was at first acquitted, but was later charged again with heresies on these nine counts, with fifty-six more, and was deprived of his rectory in 1655.

He valiantly defended himself in a book with the t.i.tle, _Truth appearing through the Clouds of Undeserved Scandel_, and in other publications, and after the Restoration he was reinstated. As the Behmenists were definitely attacked by the Quaker, John Anderdon, in 1661, it is to be inferred that they existed as a society at least as early as the {228} Restoration, though the movement became much more prominent in the 'seventies, when Pordage discovered a remarkable woman named Jane Leade, and they "agreed to wait together in prayer and pure dedication." Jane Leade, whose maiden name was Jane Ward, was born of a good English family in 1623. She was a psychopathic child, and as a young girl "heard miraculous voices" which led her to devote herself to religion. She became profoundly impressed with the writings of Boehme, as Pordage had been still earlier, and under the _suggestion_ of Boehme's experiences she received many "prophetic visions," which are recorded in her spiritual Diary, _A Fountain of Gardens_.[60] A few instances of her experiences in the early stages will be of some value to the reader. She was visiting, she says, in April 1670, in a quiet, retired place, and was "contemplating the happy state of the angelical world, much exercised upon Solomon's choice, which was to find out the n.o.ble Stone of Wisdom." "There came upon me an overshadowing bright cloud, and in the midst of it the Figure of a woman, most richly adorned with transparent gold, her hair hanging down, and her face as terrible as chrystal for brightness, but her countenance was sweet and mild. At which sight I was somewhat amazed, and immediately this Voice came, saying, Behold, I am G.o.d's Eternal Virgin, Wisdom, whom thou hast been enquiring after. I am to unseal the Treasures of G.o.d's deep Wisdom unto thee. . . . Wisdom shall be born in the inward parts of thy soul." Three days later, "the same Figure in greater Glory did appear, with a crown upon her head, full of majesty, saying, Behold me as thy Mother and know thou art to enter into covenant, to obey the New-Creation laws that shall be revealed unto thee."[61] In her account of the following extraordinary experience there are many marks of Boehme's influence: "I retained no strength, my Sun of Reason and the Moon of my outward sense were folded up and withdrew. I knew nothing by myself, as {229} to those working properties from Nature and Creature, and the wheel of the Motion standing still, another [influence] moved from a central Fire, so that I felt myself trans.m.u.ted into one pure flame. Then came that Word to me, 'This is no other than the Gate to my Eternal Deep.'"[62]

Pordage's main contribution to the exposition of "Behmenism" was a book published in 1683 and ent.i.tled, _Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic Divinitie of the Eternal Invisibles_. It is the work of a confused mind, and its spiritual penetration, as also its mastery of the English language, are of a low order. The marks of Boehme's influence appear everywhere in the book, though Pordage is quite incapable of comprehending the more profound and robust features of Boehme's philosophy. What he relates professes to be what he himself has _seen_ in visions, or what he has heard from celestial visitants. It has, he says, been his privilege to taste much of that Tree of Life which grows in the midst of the Paradise of G.o.d; to smell the difference between heaven and h.e.l.l; to have seen through the veil of nature into the spiritual glory of eternity, to have felt "the distillations of heavenly dew and secret touches of the Holy Ghost." Unlike his Teutonic master, he taught (and it was also the view of Jane Leade) that in the end Divine Love trans.m.u.tes evil into good and even h.e.l.l into Paradise. One pa.s.sage in his book, written in his best style, will be sufficient to ill.u.s.trate his glowing optimism: "Love is of a trans.m.u.ting and transforming Nature. The great effect of Love is to turn all things into its own Nature, which is all goodness, sweetness, and perfection. This is that Divine Power which turns Water into Wine, Sorrow and h.e.l.lish Anguish into exulting and triumphing Joy; Curse into Blessing; where it meets with a barren heathy Desart it trans.m.u.tes it into a Paradise of delights; yea, it changeth evil to good and all imperfection into perfection. It restores that which is fallen and degenerated to its primary Beauty, Excellence and Perfection. It is {230} the Divine Stone, the White Stone with a Name written on it, which none knows but him that hath it . . . the Divine Elixir whose transforming power and efficacy nothing can withstand."[63]

His greater disciple, Jane Leade, "the enamoured woman-devotee of Pordage," the main exponent of the Behmenist movement of this period, was a far too voluminous writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls her writings "a huge ma.s.s of parabolicalism and idiocratic deformity!"[64] In her _Message to the Philadelphian Society_ she reports a curious vision from heaven which a.s.sures her that the Quakers are not G.o.d's chosen people. There pa.s.s in review before her illuminated sight the various claimants to the lofty t.i.tle of the true Church, the real Bride of Christ. There are Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchy Men, and many others. "Then," she says, "did I see a body greater than any of these come up with great boldness, as deeming themselves to have arrived to Perfection and so visibly distinguishing themselves from all the rest, and I said, Now surely the anointed of the Lord is before Him. But a Voice said, Neither are these they; for the Lord seeth not as man seeth."[66]

A third and intellectually far greater member of this group of "Behmenists" was Francis Lee, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, a student in Leyden University, and a man of splendid parts. He became acquainted with the movement while in Holland, and on his return home sought out Jane Leade, became her adopted son, and, later, on the strength of a "revelation" made to his {231} spiritual mother, he married her daughter. Until the time of Jane Leade's death in 1704, he was her devoted disciple, writing for her in the period of her blindness, and editing and publishing many of her books. He was the moving spirit in the formation of "the Philadelphian Society" for the propagation of the mystical ideas of the followers of Boehme--a Society which existed from 1697 to 1703, and which had a far-reaching influence not only in England but still more on the Continent of Europe.[67]

John Anderdon, an interesting Quaker pamphleteer, born in 1624, convinced of the Truth of the Quaker Message by the preaching of Francis Howgil in 1658, and for many years a prisoner for his faith, for which he finally died in prison, furnishes in his attack on the "Behmenists" in 1661 the earliest data available for an estimate of their views and practices.[68] The writer has evidently read the works of Jacob Boehme, or at least some of them, and he contends that the "Behmenists" whom he is attacking have failed to understand the writings of their master and have never fathomed "the tendencie of his spirit": "The Conclusion which you have drawn to yourselves from his Writings will not profit you; neither doth it make you any jot the more excellent, that ye can talk much of him and his Books and Writings, being not come to the right Spirit in which is life, which brings men out of dead Forms."[69]

His main criticism of the little sect is that its members make use of "Mediums and borrowed Instruments for the conveyance of G.o.d's Grace and Virtue into the Soul,"[70] and that they have "not come to the Light which gives {232} a true understanding of the things of G.o.d," though he admits that there "was sometime" in them "a hungering and thirsting after Righteousness."[71] These "Mediums" are evidently the Water of Baptism and the Bread and Wine of the Supper--"Ordinances," he says, "as you call them."[72] It would seem from this Quaker Pamphlet that the "Behmenists" under review were much like the followers of Fox, except only that they continued to use the sacraments. This use of "Mediums" seemed to him indicate that they were "out of the Light" and "trying to _cover_ the serpent's head," instead of stamping on it, but Anderdon would not have written his _Blow at Babel_ if he had not been impressed with the general marks of likeness in other respects between the "Behmenists" and his own people.

Another interesting Quaker doc.u.ment furnishes a glimpse of the "Behmenists" a dozen years later--at about the period when John Pordage and Jane Leade were beginning to "wait together in prayer and pure meditation." It is a Minute adopted by the London "Morning Meeting" of Friends, "the 21st of ye 7th Month 1674." The occasion for action was the reception of "an Epistle to the Behminists," written by Ralph Frettwell of Barbadoes, at an earlier period "one of the Chief Judges of the Court of Common-pleas" in the island. He had been stirred to write for the same reason that impelled Anderdon, and his "Epistle"

called these partly spiritualized people, as he believed, to the fuller Light, and warned them against the use of Baptism, and Bread and Wine, and "the Pater Noster." The Minute of the Morning Meeting, which opens with the words: "Deare freind R. F. in the Truth that never changeth but changeth all who believe and obey it," records the decision of the Meeting not to publish the Epistle, "wee haveing well weighed it in the feare of G.o.d and in tender Care of Truth." The reason given in the Minutes for not publishing the "Epistle" is, first, that "the writings of J. B. reveal {233} a great mixture of light and darkness," and indicate that he lived sometimes in the power of one and sometimes in the power of the other, that G.o.d Himself has tried and judged the Spirit of darkness, and that the Spirit of Light has already "come to its own Centre and flows forth again purely"--presumably in the Quaker movement.[73] As the Lord Himself has given judgment and has given victory to the Principle of the Light, the publication of the "Epistle"

is unnecessary.

And, secondly, Frettwell, in calling the "Behmenists" from "the use of Mediums," admits that at an earlier period of his life, before he received the full Light, he "received light and peace" through these external things. This seemed to the Meeting "too much giveing them encouragement" to dwell in things which give "only drynesse and barrenness," and they fear that "the ffoxes among them would take advantage" of this aid and comfort.[74] It would appear that the gravamen of the Quaker attack on the little sect was the failure of its members to dispense with sacraments. At a later period, when the "Philadelphian Society" was in full flower, an old-time pillar Quaker, George Keith, then become a Churchman and "an apostate" in the eyes of Friends, attacked the writings of Jane Leade on the ground that "she wrote derogatory to the Humanity of Christ," _i.e._ the historical Christ. Francis Lee took up vigorously the defence, and told George Keith that he himself had taught again and again the same principle of inward Light and inward Religion, that he had never yet publicly renounced these early ideas of his, and that he of all men ought to understand the meaning of a Christ within and of a "Still Eternity."[75]

Traces of Boehme's influence appear in the terms and {234} ideas of many English writers during the period under consideration, besides those specifically mentioned. Sir Isaac Newton read Boehme's books with great appreciation and meditated upon those strange accounts of the invisible universe which underlies and is in the visible world, but we need not take too seriously the claim of the "Behmenists" that "he was ploughing with Behmen's heifer" when he discovered the law of universal gravitation![76] Milton, without any doubt, had read the German mystic's account of the eternal war between the Light Principle and the Dark Principle, of the fall of Lucifer, of the loss of Paradise, and of the return of man in Christ to Paradise, and there are many pa.s.sages in the great poet which look decidedly like germinations from the seed which Boehme sowed, but we must observe caution in tracing the origin of verses written by a poet of Milton's genius and originality and range of knowledge. One great Englishman of a later period, William Law, unmistakably owed to Jacob Boehme the main influences which transformed his life, and through the pure and lucid style of this n.o.ble English mystic of the eighteenth century, Boehme's insights found a new interpretation and a clearer expression than he himself or any other interpreter had been able to give them.[77]

[1] "The Life of one Jacob Boehmen, who although he was a meane man, yet wrote the most wonderful deepe knowledge in Naturall and Divine Things, that any hath been known to doe since the Apostles' Times, and yet never read them or learned them from any other man, as may be scene in that which followeth."--London, 1644, printed by L. N. for Richard Whitaker.

[2] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge edition, 1911), i. p. 18.

[3] Preface, A. 4.

[4] _Ibid._

[5] _Journ._ i. p. 29.

[6] _The Life of Jacob Behmen_, written by Durant Hotham, Esquire, November 7, 1653. Printed for H. Blunden, and sold at the Castle in Corn Hill, 1654.

[7] _Life of Jacob Behmen_, B. 2.

[8] _Op. cit._ B. 2.

[9] The writings were translated in the following order: In 1647, _Forty Questions_ by Sparrow; _The Clavis_, by Sparrow. In 1648, _The Three Principles_, by Sparrow; _The Way to Christ_ (including the Treatises, _On True Repentance_; _On True Resignation_; _On Regeneration_; _The Supersensual Life_; and _On Illumination_), by Sparrow. In 1649, _Of the Last Times_, by Sparrow; _Epistles of Jacob Behmen_, by Ellistone. In 1650, _The Three-fold Life_, by Sparrow. In 1651, _De signatura rerum_, by Ellistone. In 1652, _Christ's Testaments_--Baptism and Supper,--by Sparrow. In 1654, _The Mysterium magnum_, by Ellistone and Sparrow; _A Table of the Divine Manifestation_, by H. Blunden and Sparrow; _A Table of the Three Principles_, H. Blunden and Sparrow; _An Epitome of the Three Principles_, by Sparrow. In 1655, _On Predestination_, by Sparrow; _A Short Compendium on Repentance_, by Sparrow. In 1656, _The Aurora_, by Sparrow. In 1659, _The Treatise on the Incarnation_, by Sparrow. In 1661, _The Great Six Points_; _The Earthly and Heavenly Mystery_; _The Four Complexions_; _Two Apologies to Tylcken_; _Considerations concerning Stiefel's Threefold State of Man_; _An Apology concerning Perfection_; _On Divine Contemplation_; _An Apology for the Books on True Repentance and True Resignation_; _177 Theosophic Questions_; _The Holy Week_; _25 Epistles_, by Sparrow.

[10] Sparrow refers to this book in his Introduction to _The Three Principles_ as follows: "For a taste of the Spirit of prophecy which the author [Boehme] had, there is a little treatise of some prophecies concerning these latter times, collected out of his writings by a lover of the Teutonic philosophy and ent.i.tled Mercurius Teutonicus."

[11] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.

[12] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Introd. to _The Three Princ._

[16] Introd. to _The Three Princ._

[17] Ibid.

[18] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._

[19] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._

[20] Preface to the Reader in _Aurora_.

[21] Preface for the _Aurora_.

[22] Preface for the _Aurora_.