ny blasphemies in the shoemaker's book as there are
lines. It smells of shoemaker's wax and filthy blacking. May this
intolerable stench be far from us.

[44] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 5.

[45] _Thirty-third Epistle_.

[46] _Thirty-fourth Epistle_, 16 and 21.

[47] Weissner's Narrative, _Memoirs_, p. 49.

[48] _Ibid._ p. 58.

[49] _Wort und Geist_, p. 196 _seq._

[50] What could be a bolder criticism of the existing Church of his day
than this: "In place of the wolf [the Roman Church] there has grown up
the fox [the Lutheran Church] another anti-Christ, never a whit better
than the first. If he should come to be old enough how he would devour
the poor people's hens!"--_The Three Principles of the Divine Essence_,
xviii. 102.

[51] _Mysterium magnum_, xxvii. 47.

[52] _Ibid._ xxviii. 49-51.

[53] _Mysterium magnum_, xxxvi. 34; xl. 98.

[54] _Ibid._ lxiii. 47-51; _Twenty-first Epistle_, 1.

[55] _Myst. mag._ xxv. 13.

[56] _The First Epistle_, 3-5.

[57] _Apology to Tilken_, ii. 298.

[58] _Ibid._ 72. Compare George Fox's testimony: "All must come to
that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the Scriptures aright,
which they that gave them forth were led and taught by."--_Journal_
(ed. 1901), i. 35 and _passim_.

[59] _Sig. re._ xiv. i.

[60] _Myst. mag._ lxx. 40.

[61] _Fourth Epistle_, 27 and 32.

[62] _The Three Princ._ xxii. 2.

[63] _Aurora_, iii. 39.

{172}

CHAPTER X

BOEHME'S UNIVERSE

"If thou wilt be a philosopher or naturalist and search into God's
being in Nature and discern how it all came to pass, then pray to God
for the Holy Spirit to enlighten thee. In thy flesh and blood thou art
not able to apprehend it, but dost read it as if a mist were before thy
eyes. In the Holy Spirit alone, and in the whole Nature out of which
all things were made, canst thou search into Nature."--_Aurora_, ii.
15-17.

One idea underlies everything which Boehme has written, namely, that
nobody can successfully "search into visible Nature," or can say
anything true about Man or about the problem of good and evil, until he
has "apprehended _the whole Nature out of which all things were made_."
It will not do, he thinks, to make the easy assumption that in the
beginning the world was made out of nothing. "If God made all things
out of nothing," he says, "then the visible world would be no
revelation of Him, for it would have nothing of Him in it. He would
still be off beyond