n the sheath and lives in
the virtue and power of peace and love. "What will Christ say," he
asks the ministers of the Church of his day, "when He sees your
apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the
Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, or to instigate kings
and princes to put on the sword and kill?"[45]

Like the prophets of Israel, he feels intensely the sufferings of the
poor and the oppressed, and he breaks out frequently into a biting
satire on a kind of Christianity which not only neglects the true
_cure_ of soul and body, but "consumes the sweat and blood of the
needy," and feeds upon "the sighs and groans and tears of the
poor."[46] The true idea of a _real_ Christianity is "fraternity in
the Life of Christ"--"thy brother's soul," he says, "is a fellow-member
with thy soul,"[47] and he insists, as though it were the mighty burden
of his spirit, that all possessions, goods, and talents shall
contribute to the common life of humanity and to the benefit of the
social group.[48] It is much better for parents to labour to form good
souls in their children than to strive to gather and to leave behind
for them great riches and abundance of goods![49] Self-desire is a
ground not only of personal disquiet but also of social disturbance,
and Boehme feels that the way to spread peace and joy through the world
is to cultivate the Love-spirit of Christ and to practice it in
fellowship with men.

Like his German predecessor, Sebastian Franck, he is {200} primarily
concerned with the invisible Church, and he holds lightly to the
empirical Church as he knows it. The Church to which his spirit is
dedicated is the organic Life-Tree of which Christ is the living Stem.
The holy Zion is not from without, he says, it is built up of those who
are joined to Christ and who all live together in one city which is
Christ in us.[50] A Christian in the life belongs to no sect, he
ceases to wrangle over opinions and words, he dwells in the midst of
sects and Babel-churches, but he keeps above the controversies and
contentions, and "puts his knowing and willing into the Life of
Christ," and works quietly on toward the formation and triumph of the
one true Christian Church,[51] which will be, when its glory is
complete, the visible expression of the Divine Life-Tree.

He dislikes, as much as did the English Quaker, George Fox, the custom
of calling "stone houses" churches, and he will not admit