n you, quench it not, for it is of GOD.
Nay, it is GOD Himself in you. It depends upon yourself whether or no
that which is at this moment the smallest of all seeds is yet to become
in you the greatest and the most fruitful of all trees.

'Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,' is a characteristic saying
of a fellow-countryman of Behmen's. And Behmen's super-confessional and
almost super-scriptural treatment of that frequent scriptural
anthropomorphism,--'unavoidable and yet intolerable,'--the wrath of GOD,
must be left by me in Behmen's own bold pages. Strong meat belongeth to
them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their
senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Behmen's philosophical,
theological, and experimental doctrine of sin also, with one example,
must be wholly passed by. 'If all trees were clerks,' he exclaims in one
place, 'and all their branches pens, and all the hills books, and all the
water ink, yet all would not sufficiently declare the evil that sin hath
done. For sin has made this house of heavenly light to be a den of
darkness; this house of joy to be a house of mourning, lamentation, and
woe; this house of all refreshment to be full of hunger and thirst; this
abode of love to be a prison of enmity and ill-will; this seat of
meekness to be the haunt of pride and rage and malice. For laughter sin
has brought horror; for munificence, beggary; and for heaven, hell. Oh,
thou miserable man, turn convert. For the Father stretches out both His
hands to thee. Do but turn to Him and He will receive and embrace thee
in His love.' It was the sin and misery of this world that first made
Jacob Behmen a philosopher, and it was the sinfulness of his own heart
that at last made him a saint. Behmen's full doctrine and practice of
prayer also; his fine and fruitful treatment of what he always calls 'the
process of CHRIST'; and, intimately connected with that, his still super-
confessional treatment of imputation,--of all that, and much more like
that, I cannot now attempt to speak. Nor yet of his superb teaching on
love. 'Throw out thy heart upon all men,' he now commands and now
beseeches us. 'Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost
exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the
world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy contempt, thy envy, thy distaste,
thy dislike will still have dominion over thee. The Divine Nature will
be quenche