in God."[25] "The soul of man," he
says again, "has come out from the eternal Father, out from the Divine
Centre, but this soul--with this high origin and this noble
mark--stands always at the opening of two gates."[36] Two worlds, two
mighty cosmic principles, make their appeal to his will. Two kingdoms
wrestle in him, two natures strive for the mastery in his life, and he
makes his world, his nature, his life, his eternal destiny by his
choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it
words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The
good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the
soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every
man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to
God, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is
the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the
atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his
abiding nature. "Adam fell"--and any man's name can here be
substituted for "Adam"--"because, though he was a spark of God's
eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the
universal Will--by contraction--and withdrew into self-seeking, and
centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature--or
harmonious balance of qualities--and turned his will toward the dark
world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is
to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is
to be Christ[40]--and before every soul the two {186} gates stand
open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating passage he says: "We should
take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an
angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are
that."[42]

This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of
"the next world"--"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the
crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and hell a
yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific
scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the
essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly
that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects
in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world.
"God's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if God did but put
away the v