t is that we are so much more at
home with Behmen, the prodigal son, than we are with Behmen, the
theosophical theologian. When Behmen begins to teach us to pray, and
when the lesson comes to us out of his own closet, then we are able to
see in a nearer light something of the originality, the greatness, the
strength, and the true and genuine piety of the philosopher and the
theologian. When Behmen's philosophy and theology become penitence,
prayer, and praise, then by their fruits we know how good his philosophy
and his theology must be, away down in their deepest and most hidden
nature. I agree with Walton that those prayers are full of unction and
instruction, and that some of them are of the 'highest magnetical power';
and that, as rendered into modern phraseology, they are most beautiful
devotional compositions, and very models of all that a divinely
illuminated mind would address to GOD and CHRIST. For myself,
immediately after the Psalms of David I put Jacob Behmen's _Holy Week_
and the prayers scattered up and down through his _True Repentance_, and
beside Behmen I put Bishop Andrewes' _Private Devotions_. I have
discovered no helps to my own devotional life for a moment to set beside
Behmen and Andrewes.

_A Treatise on Baptism and the Lord's Supper_; _A Key to the Principal
Points and Expressions in the Author's Writings_; and then a most
valuable volume of letters--_Epistolae Theosophicae_--complete the
extraordinarily rich bibliography of the illuminated and blessed Jacob
Behmen.

Though there is a great deal of needless and wearisome repetition in
Jacob Behmen's writings, at the same time there is scarcely a single
subject in the whole range of theology on which he does not throw a new,
an intense, and a brilliant light. In his absolutely original and
magnificent doctrine of GOD, while all the time loyally true to it,
Behmen has confessedly transcended the theology of both the Latin and the
Reformed Churches; and, absolutely unlettered man though he is, has taken
his stand at the very head of the great Greek theologians. The Reformers
concentrated their criticism upon the anthropology and soteriology of the
Church of Rome, and especially upon the discipline and worship connected
therewith. They saw no need for recasting any of the more fundamental
positions of pure theology. And while Jacob Behmen, broadly speaking,
accepts as his own confession of faith all that Luther and Calvin and
their collea