selves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The
"doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it
that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can
be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for
us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a
history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the
sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child
of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical
faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such
"invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail
nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]

The gravamen of his charge is not that the "opinions" are false, or
that the "history" is unimportant, but that "opinions" and "history"
are taken as substitutes for religion itself, which is and must always
be an actual inward process constructing a new and victorious life in
the person himself. "All fictions, I say, and devices which men
contrive to come to God by are lost labour and vain endeavour _without
a new mind_. Verbal forgiveness and outward imputation of
righteousness are false and vain comforts--soft cushions for the evil
soul--without the creation of a will wholly new, which loveth and
willeth evil no more."[16] The whole problem, then, is the problem of
the formation of a new vision, a new desire, a new will, and Boehme
finds the solution of this deepest human problem in Christ. Christ is
the Light-revelation of God--the shining forth of the Light and Love
nature of the Eternal God. It must not be supposed for a moment that
once--before satisfaction was made to Him--God was an angry God who had
to be "reconciled" by a transaction, or that there was _a time in
history_ when God began to reveal His Heart in a Christ-revelation, or
{194} that when Christ became man, Deity divided itself into sundered
Persons.[17] "No. You ought not to have such thoughts," Boehme says.
The Heart and Light and Love of God are from eternity. Christ has
never sundered or broken Himself away from God; they are not two but
forever One. All the Light and Love and Joy of God have blossomed into
the Christ-manifestation and become revealed in Him. Like everything
else in the universe, Christ is both outward and inward. He belongs in
the eternal inward world and He also has had His tem