counsel, the {158} stranger pressed his
hand and went his way, leaving the boy amazed.[15]

He had, his intimate biographer tells us, lived from his very youth up
in the fear of God, in all humility and simplicity, and had taken
peculiar pleasure in hearing sermons, but from the opening of his
apprenticeship he began to revolt from the endless controversies and
"scholastic wranglings about religion," and he withdrew into himself,
fervently and incessantly praying and seeking and knocking, until one
day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest
to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the
Divine Light for the space of seven days and stood possessed of the
highest beatific wisdom of God, in the ecstatic joy of the
Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his
spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to
live a pure life of godliness and virtue, refusing to listen to
frivolous talk, reproving his fellows and even his shopmaster when they
indulged in light and wanton conversation, until finally the master
discharged him with the remark that he did not care to keep "a
house-prophet" any longer.[17] Hereupon he went forth as a travelling
cobbler, spending some years in his wanderings, discovering more and
more, as he passed from place to place, how religion was being lost in
the Babel of theological wrangling, and seeing, with those penetrating
eyes of his, deeper into the meaning of life and the world. Near the
end of the century--probably about 1599--he gave up his wanderings,
married Catherine Kunchman, "a young woman of virtuous disposition,"
and opened a shoemaker's shop for himself in the town of Goerlitz, where
he soon established a reputation for honest, faithful work, and where
he modestly prospered and was able to buy a home of his own, and where
he reared the four sons and two daughters who came to the happy home.

{159}

The supreme experience of his life--and one of the most remarkable
instances of "illumination" in the large literature of mystical
experiences--occurred when Boehme was twenty-five years of age, some
time in the year 1600. His eye fell by chance upon the surface of a
polished pewter dish which reflected the bright sunlight, when suddenly
he felt himself environed and penetrated by the Light of God, and
admitted into the innermost ground and centre of the universe. His
experience, instead of waning