Jacob Behmen | Page 6

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