h other--each within the other--one love,
the other wrath; one light, the other darkness; one heavenly, the other
hellish.[23]

Now out of this inner spiritual universe--a double universe of light
and darkness--this temporal, visible, more or less material, world has
come forth, as an outer sheath of an inner world, and, like its Mother,
it, too, is a double world of good and evil. "There is not," as
William Law, interpreting Boehme, once said, "the smallest thing or the
smallest quality of a thing in this world, but is a quality of heaven
or hell discovered [_i.e._ revealed] under a temporal form. Every
thing that is disagreeable to taste, to the sight, to our hearing,
smelling or feeling has its root and ground and cause in and from hell
[the dark kingdom], and is as surely in its degree the working and
manifestation of hell in this world, as the most diabolical malice and
wickedness is; the stink of weeds, of mire, of all poisonous, corrupted
things; shrieks, horrible sounds; wrathful fire, rage of tempests and
thick darkness, are all of them things that had no possibility of
existence, till the fallen angels disordered their kingdom [_i.e._
until the inner universe was spoiled by narrow, sundered desires].
Therefore everything that is disagreeable and horrible in this life,
everything that can afflict and terrify our senses, all the kinds of
natural and moral evil, are only so much of the nature, effects and
manifestation of hell, for hell and evil are only two words for one and
the same thing. . . . On the other hand, all that is sweet, delightful
and amiable in the world, in the serenity of air, the fineness of
seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colours,
the fragrance of smells, the splendour of precious stones, is nothing
else but heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting
itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of
its own nature."[24]

I have spoken so far as though Boehme traced the {180} source of every
thing to _will and desire_, as though, in fact, the visible universe
were the manifold outer expression of some deep-lying personal will,
and in the last analysis that is true, but his more usual form of
interpretation is that of the working of great structural _tendencies_,
or _energies_, or "_qualities_," as he calls them, which are common
both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again
and again with painful r