which
one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from
life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the
kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant
spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the
principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is
opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he
says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of
God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ
and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as
the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the
Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life,
one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far
away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to
itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents
when a little child is born to them.[37] God's will now becomes the
man's will, he turns back into the unity from which he broke away, he
sees now in one moment what all the doctors in the schools, on the mere
level of reason, have never seen, and his inward eye is so opened that
he knows God as soon as his eye turns toward Him.[38]

This Faith-process, or innermost life-birth, is not the act of a moment
that is over and done with. It means the progressive formation of a
new man within the man, so that the real Christian becomes a living
branch in a mighty Christ-Tree. Just as Adam was the trunk of a great
race-tree of fallen humanity, Christ is to be the Eternal Life-Tree of
the universe in whom all the new-born souls of men shall live as
springing, flowering branches or twigs: God created only one Man; all
other men are twigs of the One Stem.[39] "In Christ," he says, "we are
all only one, as a tree in many boughs and branches," and, with a
return to autobiography, Boehme adds, "His Life has been brought into
mine, so that I am atoned with Him in His Love. The will of Christ has
entered into humanity again in me, and now my will in me enters into
His humanity."[40] He writes to one of his Silesian friends: "You are
a growing branch in the Life-Tree of God in Christ, in whom all the
children of God are also branches," and he adds that there is "no other
faith {198} which saves except