phasis. His feet, however, were set upon the track which seemed to
him to lead to light by the help which he got from the other line of
reformers. Schwenckfeld made him feel the impossibility of any scheme
of salvation that rested on transactions and operations external to the
human soul itself, and through that same noble Silesian reformer he
discovered the central significance of the new birth through a creative
work of Grace within. Sebastian Franck was clearly one of his
spiritual masters. From him, directly or indirectly, he learned that
the spirit must be freed from the letter, that external revelations are
symbols which remain dead and inert until they are vivified and
vitalized by the inwardly illuminated spirit. He was still more
directly influenced by Valentine Weigel, the pastor of Zschopau, who
united the spiritual-mystical views of Schwenckfeld, Franck, and the
other teachers of his type with a nature mysticism or theosophy which
had become, as we have seen, a powerful interest in the sixteenth
century when a real science was struggling to be born, but had not yet
seen the light. This nature mysticism came to him also in a crude and
indigestible form through the writings of Paracelsus. Through him
Boehme acquired a vocabulary of alchemistical terms which he was always
labouring to turn to spiritual meaning, but which always baffled him.
It has been customary to treat Boehme as a mystic, and he has not {155}
usually been brought into this line of spiritual development where I am
placing him, but his entire outlook and body of ideas are different
from those of the great Roman Catholic mystics. He has read neither
the classical nor the scholastic interpreters of mysticism. In so far
as he knows of historical mysticism he knows it through Franck and
Weigel and others, where it is profoundly transformed and subordinated
to other aspects of religion and thought. Unlike the great mystics, he
does not treat the visible and the finite as unreal and to be negated.
The world is a positive reality and a divine revelation. Nor, again,
are sin and evil negative in character for him. Evil is tremendously
real and positive, in grim conflict with the good and to be conquered
only through stern battle. A mystic, an illuminate, he undoubtedly was
in his first-hand experience, but his message of salvation and his
interpretation of life are of the wider, distinctively "spiritual" type.

Jacob Boehme[11] was born in