of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door
opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_
appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul
to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and,
with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."

His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new
pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon.
The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of
Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had
rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this
sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and
a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them
writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried
his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now
informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_"
sleeps beneath.

Gruetzmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little,
if any, historical connection with {169} the past.[49] I do not agree
with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the
powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion,
and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was
voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder,
Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme
and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note
of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon
the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and
practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and
stubborn opposition.[50]

The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride
and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the
written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a
pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's
living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of
"verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned
faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of
"the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says,
"cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the
teacher in the human heart"--"they