_Aurora_; if a new idea is
a pain and a provocation to you; if you have any prejudice in your heart
for any reason against Behmen; if you dislike the sound of his name
because some one you dislike has discovered him and praised him, or
because you do not yourself already know him and love him, then, no
doubt, you will find plenty in Behmen at which to stumble, and which will
amply justify you in anything you wish to say against him. But if you
are a true student and a good man; if you are an open-minded and a humble-
minded man; if you are prepared to sit at any man's feet who will engage
to lead you a single step out of your ignorance and your evil; if you
open Behmen with a predisposition to believe in him, and with the
expectation and the determination to get good out of him,--then, in the
measure of all that; in the measure of your capacity of mind and your
hospitality of heart; in the measure of your humility, seriousness,
patience, teachableness, hunger for truth, hunger for righteousness,--in
that measure you will find Jacob Behmen to be what MAURICE tells us he
found him to be, 'a generative thinker.' Out of much you cannot
understand,--wherever the blame for that may lie,--out of much slag and
much dross, I am mistaken if you will not lay up some of your finest
gold; and out of much straw and chaff some of the finest of the wheat.
The Divine Nature, human nature, time, space, matter, life, love, sin,
death, holiness, heaven, hell,--Behmen's reader must have lived and moved
all his days among such things as these: he must be at home, as far as
the mind of man can be at home, among such things as these, and then he
will begin to understand Behmen, and will still strive better and better
to understand him; and, where he does not as yet understand him, he will
set that down to his own inattention, incapacity, want of due
preparation, and want of the proper ripeness for such a study.

At the same time let all intending students of Jacob Behmen take warning
that they will have to learn an absolutely new and an unheard-of language
if they would speak with Behmen and have Behmen speak with them. For
Behmen's books are written neither in German nor in English of any age or
idiom, but in the most original and uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan,
but never with John Bunyan's literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a
Latin word or phrase from his reading of learned authors, or, more often,
from the conversations of his