Jacob Behmen | Page 8

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, and a treasure-house
of masculine English. (If Christopher Walton is right, we must read
'Lee' for 'Law' in this passage. If Walton is right, then there was a
master of English in those days we had not before been told of.)
A Treatise of the Four Complexions, or A Consolatory Instruction for a
Sad and Assaulted Heart, was Behmen's next book. The four
complexions are the four temperaments--the choleric, the sanguine, the
phlegmatic, and the melancholy. Behmen's treatise has been well