the heart of GOD. I can compare it to nothing else but the
resurrection at the last day. For then, with all reverence I say it,
with the eyes of my spirit I saw GOD. I saw both what GOD is, and I saw
how GOD is what He is. And with that there came a mighty and an
incontrollable impulse to set it down, so as to preserve what I had seen.
Some men will mock me, and will tell me to stick to my proper trade, and
not trouble my mind with philosophy and theology. Let these high matters
alone. Leave them to those who have both the time and the talent for
them, they will say. So I have often said to myself, but the truth of
GOD did burn in my bones till I took pen and ink and began to set down
what I had seen. All this time do not mistake me for a saint or an
angel. My heart also is full of all evil. In malice, and in hatred, and
in lack of brotherly love, after all I have seen and experienced, I am
like all other men. I am surely the fullest of all men of all manner of
infirmity and malignity.' Behmen protests in every book of his that what
he has written he has received immediately from GOD. 'Let it never be
imagined that I am any greater or any better than other men. When the
Spirit of GOD is taken away from me I cannot even read so as to
understand what I have myself written. I have every day to wrestle with
the devil and with my own heart, no man in all the world more. Oh no!
thou must not for one moment think of me as if I had by my own power or
holiness climbed up into heaven or descended into the abyss. Oh no! hear
me. I am as thou art. I have no more light than thou hast. Let no man
think of me what I am not. But what I am all men may be who will truly
believe, and will truly wrestle for truth and goodness under JESUS
CHRIST. I marvel every day that GOD should reveal both the Divine Nature
and Temporal and Eternal Nature for the first time to such a simple and
unlearned man as I am. But what am I to resist what GOD will do? What
am I to say but, Behold the son of thine handmaiden! I have often
besought Him to take these too high and too deep matters away from off
me, and to commit them to men of more learning and of a better style of
speech. But He always put my prayer away from Him and continued to
kindle His fire in my bones. And with all my striving to quench GOD'S
spirit of revelation, I found that I had only by that gathered the more
stones for the house that He had ordained me to build for