learned friends; and then he will take some
astrological or alchemical expression of AGRIPPA, or PARACELSUS, or some
such outlaw, and will, as with his awl and rosin-end, sew together a
sentence, and hammer together a page of the most incongruous and unheard-
of phraseology, till, as we read Behmen's earlier work especially, we
continually exclaim, O for a chapter of John Bunyan's clear, and sweet,
and classical English! The _Aurora_ was written in a language, if
writing and a language it can be called, that had never been seen written
or heard spoken before, or has since, on the face of the earth. And as
our students learn Greek in order to read Homer and Plato and Paul and
John, and Latin in order to read Virgil and Tacitus, and Italian to read
Dante, and German to read Goethe, so William Law tells us that he learned
Behmen's Behmenite High Dutch, and that too after he was an old man, in
order that he might completely master the _Aurora_ and its kindred books.
And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek
and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great
authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and
even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen,
because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master
his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all
that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells
us how the readers of SCHELLING were surprised and enraptured by a wealth
of new expressions and new turns of speech in their mother tongue. But
all these belonged to Behmen, or were fashioned on the model of his
symbolical language. As it is, with all his astrology, and all his
alchemy, and all his barbarities of form and expression, I for one will
always take sides with the author of _The Serious Call_, and _The Spirit
of Prayer_, and _The Spirit of Love_, and _The Way to Divine Knowledge_,
in the disputed matter of Jacob Behmen's sanity and sanctity; and I will
continue to believe that if I had only had the scholarship, and the
intellect, and the patience, and the enterprise, to have mastered,
through all their intricacies, the Behmenite grammar and the Behmenite
vocabulary, I also would have found in Behmen all that Freher and Pordage
and Law and Walton found. Even in the short way into this great man that
I have gone, I have come upon such rare and rich mines of