ut," he adds, "seeing God will have it so, I submit to His
will."[7] Nobody before him, he declares, no matter how learned he
was, "has had the ax by the handle," but, with a sudden change of
figure, he proclaims that now the Morning Glow is breaking and the Day
Dawn is rising.[8] In his _Epistles_ he says: "I am only a layman, I
have not studied, yet I bring to light things which all the High
Schools and Universities have been unable to do. . . . The language of
Nature is made known to me so that I can understand the greatest
mysteries, in my own mother-tongue. Though I cannot say I have
_learned_ or _comprehended_ these things, yet so long as the hand of
God stayeth upon me I understand."[9]

We shall be able to estimate the value of these lofty {153} claims
after we have gathered up the substance of his teaching, but it may be
well to say at the opening of this Study of Boehme that in my opinion
no more remarkable religious message has come in modern centuries from
an untrained and undisciplined mind than that which lies scattered
through the voluminous and somewhat chaotic writings of this
seventeenth-century prophet of the common people.[19]

He frequently speaks of himself as "unlearned," and in the technical
sense of the word he was unlearned. He had only a simple schooling,
but he possessed extraordinary native capacity and he was well and
widely read in the books which fitted the frame and temper of his mind,
and he had very unusual powers of meditation and recollection so that
he thought over and over again in his quiet hours of labour the ideas
which he seized upon in the books he read.

There are many strands of thought woven together in his writings, and
everything he dealt with is given a {154} new aspect through the vivid
insights which he always brings into play, the amazing visual power
which he displays, and his profoundly penetrating moral and
intellectual grasp. But, nevertheless, he plainly belongs in the
direct line of these spiritual reformers whom we have been studying.
He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Luther, especially in two
directions. He got primarily from the great reformer his transforming
insight of the immense importance of personal faith for salvation, and
secondly he was impressed--almost overwhelmingly impressed in his early
years--with the awful reality and range of the principle of positive
evil in the universe, upon which Luther had insisted with intensity of
em