s, affections, and bodies of others. Behind all this
turmoil and ever unsatisfied anguish of seeking that which satisfies
not, they have been aware of a diviner life slowly growing towards
heaven, ever and again thwarted and driven back by the renewed assaults
of the Spirit of the World, yet never quite destroyed. At the moments of
fiercest fight against rebel passions they have felt the divine
assisting strength flow into them, if only they powerfully invoked it,
turning towards its source as a babe towards its mother's breast. They
have heard the "Peace be still" amid the wildest spiritual storms. They
know that if they have been saved, it is not by their own strength nor
by reasoning, but by this power from without.

They know the impotence, in action, of the merely reflective or
spectator faculty. In this sense of the word "reason," they would agree
with him who wrote "Your Heart is the best and greatest gift of God to
you; it is the highest, greatest, strongest, and noblest Power of your
Nature; it forms your whole Life, be it what it will; all Evil and all
Good comes from it; your Heart alone has the key of Life and Death; it
does all that it will; Reason is but its plaything; and whether in Time
or Eternity, can only be a mere Beholder of the wonders of happiness, or
forms of misery, which the right or wrong working of the Heart is
entered into."[G]

William Law remarks that Jesus Christ, though he had all wisdom, yet
gives but a small number of doctrines to mankind "whilst every moral
teacher writes volumes upon every single virtue." It is, he adds,
because our Lord "knew what they know not, that our whole malady lies
in this, that the Will of our Mind is turned into this World, and that
nothing can relieve us, or set us right, but the _turning_ of the Will
of our Mind and the Desire of our Hearts to God. And hence it is that he
calls us to nothing but a total denial of ourselves and the Life of this
World and to faith in him as the Worker of a new birth and life in us."
On this one root of the whole matter Jacob Behmen insisted, expressing
one truth in a thousand ways and through images, which to him are not
images but the same process working in other spheres. His whole
practical, moral teaching enforces the right direction of Desire. _Mali
mores sunt mali amores_, said one who also truly _saw_; the profound
Augustine. The hunger of the Soul must be turned to the source of
eternal joy. All that is good and be