d have him arrested; and
the following day Richter had Boehme summoned before the magistrates,
and succeeded by his influence and authority in overawing them so that
they ordered the harmless prophet to leave the town forthwith without
any time given him to see his family or to close up his affairs.
Boehme quietly replied, "Yes, dear Sirs, it shall be done; since it
cannot be otherwise I am content." The next day, however, the
magistrates of Goerlitz held a meeting and recalled the banished prophet
and offered him the privilege of remaining in his home and occupation
on condition that he would cease from writing on theological matters.
On this latter point we have Boehme's own testimony, though he does not
refer the condition to the magistrates. "When I appeared before him"
[Pastor Richter], Boehme says, "to defend myself and indicate my
standpoint, the Rev. Primarius [Richter] exacted from me a promise to
give up writing and to this I assented, since I did not then see
clearly the divine way, nor did I understand what God would later do
with me. . . . By his order I gave up for many years [1613-18] all
writing or speaking about my knowledge of divine things, hoping vainly
that the evil reports would at last come to an end, instead of which
they only grew worse and more malignant."[34]

Boehme's friend, Doctor Cornelius Weissner, in his account, which is
none too accurate, endeavours to find an explanation of Richter's
persistent hate and persecution {164} of the shoemaker-prophet in a
gentle reproof which the latter administered to the former for having
meanly treated a poor kinsman of Boehme in a small commercial
transaction, but it is by no means necessary to bring up incidents of
this sort to discover an adequate ground for Richter's fury. The
_Aurora_ itself furnishes plenty of passages which would, if read,
throw a jealous guardian of orthodoxy into fierce activity. One
passage in which Boehme boldly attacks the popular doctrine of
predestination and asserts that the writers and scribes who teach it
are "masterbuilders of Lies" will be sufficient illustration of the
theological provocation: "This present world doth dare to say that God
hath decreed or concluded it so in His predestinate purpose and counsel
that some men should be saved and some should be damned, as if hell and
malice and evil had been from eternity and that it was in God's
predestinate purpose that men should be and must be therein. Such
pe