November 1575 in the little market-town of
Alt Seidenberg, a few miles from Goerlitz. His father's name was Jacob
and his mother's Ursula, both persons of good old German peasant stock,
possessed of a strong strain of simple piety. The family religion was
Lutheran, and Jacob the son was brought up both at home and at church
in the Lutheran faith as it had shaped itself into definite form at the
end of the sixteenth century. His early education was very limited,
but he was possessed of unusual fundamental capacity and always
exhibited a native mental power of very high order. He was always a
keen observer; he looked through things, and whether he was in the
fields, where much of his early life was spent as a watcher of cattle,
or reading the Bible, which he knew as few persons have known it, he
saw everything with a vivid and quickened imagination. He plainly
began, while still very young, to revolt from the orthodox theology of
his time, and his {156} years of reading and of silent meditation and
reflection were the actual preparation for what seemed finally to come
to him like a sudden revelation or, to use his own common figure, as "a
flash."[12]

His external appearance has been quaintly portrayed by his admiring
friend and biographer, Abraham von Franckenberg, who, like a good
portrait-painter, strives to let the body reveal the soul. "The
external form of Jacob's body," he says, "was worn and very plain; his
stature was small, his forehead low, his temples broad and prominent,
his nose somewhat crooked, his eyes grey and rather of an azure-cast,
lighting up like the windows of Solomon's Temple; his beard was short
and thin; his voice was feeble, yet his conversation was mild and
pleasant. He was gentle in manner, modest in his words, humble in
conduct, patient in suffering and meek of heart. His spirit was highly
illuminated of God beyond anything Nature could produce."[13]

This youth, with "azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of
Solomon's Temple," was from his childhood possessed of a most acutely
sensitive and suggestible psychical disposition. He always felt that
the real world was deeper than the one which he saw with his senses,
and he was frequently swept from within by mighty currents which he
could not trace to any well-mapped region of the domain of Nature. His
vivid and pictorial imagination, his consciousness of inrushes from the
unplumbed deeps within, and his inclination to sol