it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote
about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His
interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general,
are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind
and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his own
_experience_ and his message of the way to God possess an elemental and
universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of
the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central
ideas of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel;
that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine
possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in
immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the
necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of
life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the
epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the
way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth
century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and
illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak
on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual
authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group.
He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time
as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the
Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much
that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the
heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]

As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of
sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of
man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a
child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God
with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the
soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an
inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he
insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of
the good and a _contrarium_, a hunger for the universal will of God and
a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the
inclination of desire, the atti