most
consistently emphasises.

Man was made out of the Breath of God; his soul is a spark of the Deity.
It therefore cannot die, for it "has the Unbeginning, Unending Life of
God in it." Man has fallen from his high estate through ignorance and
inexperience, through seeking separation, taking the part for the whole,
desiring the knowledge of good and evil as separate things. The
assertion of self is thus the root of all evil; for as soon as the will
of man "turns to itself, and would, as it were, have a Sound of its own,
it breaks off from the divine harmony, and falls into the misery of its
own discord." For it is the state of our will that makes the state of
our life. Hence, by the "fall," man's standpoint has been dislocated
from centre to circumference, and he lives in a false imagination. Every
quality is equally good, for there is nothing evil in God from whom all
comes; but evil appears to be through separation. Thus strength and
desire in the divine nature are necessary and magnificent qualities, but
when, as in the creature, they are separated from love, they appear as
evil.[34] The analogy of the fruit is, in this connection a favourite
one with both Law and Boehme. When a fruit is unripe (i.e. incomplete)
it is sour, bitter, astringent, unwholesome; but when it has been longer
exposed to the sun and air it becomes sweet, luscious, and good to eat.
Yet it is the same fruit, and the astringent qualities are not lost or
destroyed, but transmuted and enriched, and are thus the main cause of
its goodness.[35] The only way to pass from this condition of
"bitterness" to ripeness, from this false imagination to the true one,
is the way of death. We must die to what we are before we can be born
anew; we must die to the things of this world to which we cling, and for
which we desire and hope, and we must turn towards God. This should be
the daily, hourly exercise of the mind, until the whole turn and bent of
our spirit "points as constantly to God as the needle touched with the
loadstone does to the north."[36] To be alive in God, before you are
dead to your own nature, is "a thing as impossible in itself, as for a
grain of wheat to be alive before it dies."

The root of all, then, is the will or desire. This realisation of the
momentous quality of the will is the secret of every religious mystic,
the hunger of the soul, as Law calls it, is the first necessity, and all
else will follow.[37] It is the seed of everythi