ul may live its highest life. Only in
this way can the wild properties of Nature be subordinated and turned to
their proper use, their restless hunger pacified. Goodness and happiness
can be expected from nothing else but from the Divine Life united to and
dwelling in the Nature Life. It is the "ingrafted Word" of St James'
Epistle.

The plant cannot but grow towards the sun. If it is too deep in earth,
or prevented by a strong soil, or withered by dryness, so that it cannot
attain to its end, the fault is not with it. But, in the spiritual inner
world (in which the plant dwells not) the Soul of man has this
freedom--that it can consciously turn towards God, whose Spirit and Life
will then come forth to meet it, or can turn towards the Things of this
World. Upon this freedom of choice is founded Behmen's moral teaching.
The Soul is like a woman (and all nations have testified in their
languages and parables to their sense of this) who can freely choose to
submit and surrender her body to this Lover, or to that. When she has
chosen her free power ends. As she has chosen, so her life-faculty will
be fertilised by good or evil; so will be the new life that arises
within her, and so will be her future joy or sorrow.

In a deep sense, the desire of the spark of Life in the Soul to return
to its Original Source is part of the longing desire of the universal
Life for its own heart or centre. Of this longing the universal
attraction, striving against resistance, towards an universal centre,
proved to govern the phenomenal or physical world, is but the outer
sheath and visible working. It has been said that Sir Isaac Newton (who
was a diligent reader of Behmen's Works) "ploughed with Jacob Behmen's
heifer." There is in truth but one Religion, that founded upon the
eternal, immutable, universal processes of the actual Nature of things,
and of this Christianity, rightly apprehended, is the supreme
Revelation. This will be seen better by all as the Religion unfolds
itself. Rightly speaking there is no such thing as _supernatural_
religion; there is but one Religion, that of Nature. It is the work of
visible religion to teach by signs and parables, embodying the mystery
in symbols, and clothing it with adoration.

Jacob Behmen's mode of expression is all his own, and there is much in
the fabric of his thought which men of our time, if they take a
superficial view, would not find it easy to accept. The doctrine of
Evolution now pr