this
is the right hand of God. The soul that dwells in falsehood, lust,
pride, envy, and anger carries hell in itself and cannot reach the
Light and Love of God. Though it should go a thousand miles or a
thousand times ten thousand miles--even climb beyond the spaces of the
stars and the bounds of the universe--it would still remain in the same
property and source of darkness as before.[48] The "next world"--"the
world beyond"--is {188} just _this_ world, as it is in each one of us,
with its essential spirit and nature and character clearly revealed and
fulfilled. God creates and maintains no hell of ever-lasting torture;
He builds and supports no heaven of endless glory. They are both
formed out of the soul's own substance as it turns toward light or
darkness, toward love or hate--in short, as "it keeps house," to use
one of his vivid words, with the eternal nature of things.

Something like this, then, was the universe which Boehme--with those
"azure-grey eyes that lighted up like the windows of Solomon's
Temple"--saw there in Goerlitz, as he pegged his shoes. "Open your
eyes," he once said, "and the whole world is full of God."[49] But he
is not a pantheist, in the usual sense of that word, blurring away the
lines between good and evil, or the boundaries which mark off self from
self, and self from God. There is forever, to be sure, a hidden
essence or substance in the soul which is from God, and which remains
to the end unlost and unspoiled--something to which God can speak and
to which His Light and Grace can make appeal; but I am indestructibly a
real I, and God is in His true nature no vague Abyss--He eternally
utters Himself as Person: "The first Abysmal God without beginning
begets a comprehensible will which is Son. Thus the Abyss which in
itself is an indescribable Nothing [nothing in particular] forms itself
into Something [definite] through the Birth of a Son, and so is
Spirit."[50] In God Himself there is only Good, only triumphing
eternal Joy,[51] but as soon as finite processes appear, as soon as
anything is differentiated into actuality, the potentialities of
darkness and light appear, the possibilities of good and evil are
there: "_All things consist in Yes or No. In order to have anything
definite made manifest there must be a contrary therein--a Yes and a
No._"[52] The universe, therefore, though it came forth out of the
eternal Mother and remains still, in its deepest origin and being,