orld," which we shall meet in a new form
in Boehme. Another book which carried astrological ideas into
religious thought in a much cruder way was Andreas Tentzel's _De
ratione naturali arboris vitae et scientiae boni et mali_, etc., which
was Pars Secunda of his _Medicinii diastatica_ (Jena, 1629). It was
translated into English in 1657 by N. Turner with the title: "The
Mumial Treatise of Tentzelius, being a natural account of the Tree of
Life and of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a mystical
interpretation of that great Secret, to wit, the Cabalistical
Concordance of the Tree of Life and Death, of Christ and Adam." Tentzel
was a famous doctor and disciple of Paracelsus and "flourished" in
Germany during the first half of the seventeenth century.

{151}

CHAPTER IX

JACOB BOEHME: HIS LIFE AND SPIRIT[1]

Few men have ever made greater claim to be the bearer of a new
revelation than did the humble shoemaker-prophet of Silesia, Jacob
Boehme. "I am," he wrote in his earliest book, "only a very little
spark of God's Light, but He is now pleased in this last time to reveal
through me what has been partly concealed from the beginning of the
World,"[2] and he admonished the reader, if he would understand what is
written, to let go opinion {152} and conceit and heathenish wisdom, and
read with the Light and Power of the Holy Spirit, "for this book comes
not forth from Reason, but by the impulse of the Spirit."[3] "I have
not dared," he wrote to a friend in 1620, "to write otherwise than was
given and indited to me. I have continually written as the Spirit
dictated and have not given place to Reason."[4] Again and again he
warns the reader to let his book alone unless he is ready for a new
dawning of divine Truth, for a fresh Light to break: "If thou art not a
spiritual overcomer, then let my book alone. Do not meddle with it,
but _stick to thy old matters_!"[5]

Before the Spirit came upon him, he felt himself to be a "little
stammering child," and he always declared that without this Spirit he
could not comprehend even his own writings--"when He parteth from me, I
know nothing but the elementary and earthly things of this
world"[6]--but with this divine Spirit unfolding within him "the
profoundest depth" of mysteries, he believed, though with much
simplicity and generally with humility, that the true ground of things
had "not been so fully revealed to any man from the beginning of the
world"--"b