ted. So, in the outer world, the seed buried in earth contains a
power kindred to the virtue of the sun. It is this which breaks forth
from the seed, forces itself up through the dark, imprisoning, and yet
nourishing and necessary earth, and at last, if it can win its way
through obstacles, cheerfully expands in the light of the sun and feeds
upon his warmth. That, in man's inner nature, which answers to this
power or life in the seed, is called by Behmen the Life or Spirit of
Jesus Christ. Egoism or _Ihood_, the old contracting, narrowing cell, is
destroyed as this expansive and expanding force grows and breaks forth.
Behmen says: "As the Sun in the visible world ruleth over Evil and Good,
and, with its light and power, and all whatsoever itself is, is present
everywhere, and penetrates into every Being, and wholly giveth itself to
every Being, and yet ever remaineth whole, and nothing of its being
goeth away therewith. Thus also it is to be understood concerning
Christ's person and office which ruleth in the inward spiritual world,
and penetrateth into the faithful man's soul, spirit and heart. As the
Sun worketh through a herb, so that the herb becometh filled with the
virtue of the Sun, and, as it were, so converted by the Sun that it
becometh wholly of the nature of the Sun, so Christ ruleth in the
resigned will or Soul and Body, over all evil inclinations and
generateth the man to be a new heavenly creature." The same teaching is
finely set forth in a passage of William Law.[E] He says:

"Man has a spark of the Light and Spirit of God, as a supernatural gift
of God given into the birth of his Soul to bring forth by degrees a new
birth of that life which was lost in Paradise. This holy spark of the
Divine Nature within him has a natural, strong, and almost infinite
tendency or reaching after that eternal Light and Spirit of God, from
whence it came forth. It came forth from God, it came _out_ of God, it
partaketh of the Divine Nature, and therefore it is always in a state of
tendency and return to God. All this is called the breathing, the
moving, the quickening of the Holy Spirit within us, which are so many
operations of this spark of life tending towards God. On the other hand
the Deity as considered in itself, and without the Soul of man, has an
infinite unchangeable tendency of love and desire towards the Soul of
man, to unite and communicate its own riches and glories to it, just as
the Spirit of the air _with