that a
building is anything but a building: "Stone houses, called churches,
have no greater holiness than other houses, for they are built of stone
and other such material, as other houses are, and God is no more
powerful in them than He is in other houses, but the Church [_i.e._ the
Congregation] which meets there, if the members of it bind themselves
by prayer into one body in Christ, is a holy Temple of Jesus
Christ."[52]

His attitude toward outward sacraments consistently fits in with all
his central teachings. The outward, for Boehme, is never unimportant.
It is always significant and can always be used as a parable or symbol
of something inner and eternal. But the outward is at best only
temporal, only symbolic, and it becomes a hindrance if it is taken for
the real substance of which it is only the outward "signature": "The
form shall be destroyed and shall cease with time, but the spirit
remains forever."[53] The sacraments, he declares, do not take away
sin, for men go to church all their lives and receive the sacraments
{201} and remain as wicked and beastly as ever--while a holy man always
has a Church within himself and an inward ministry.[54] Blessedness,
therefore, lies not in the outward, but in the life and power of the
inward spirit, and it is only a Babel-Church that claims the right to
cast out those who have the real substance and neglect only the outward
form.[55] In his _Treatise on the Holy Supper_, he wrote: "It is not
enough for a man to hear sermons preached, and to be baptised in the
name of Christ, and to go to the Supper. This maketh no Christian.
For that, there must be _earnestness_. No person is a Christian unless
Christ live and work in him."[56]

The pith and heart of Christianity, the consummate goal of the way of
Salvation, for Boehme is, as we have seen, not "history" and not any
kind of outward "form" or "letter"--_buchstaebliches Wort_,--it is an
experience in which the soul finds itself "at the top of Jacob's
ladder," and feels its life in God and God's Life in it in an ineffable
Love-union. He has himself given a very simple and penetrating account
of this type of experience drawn from what he calls his own book of
life: "Finding within myself a powerful _contrarium_, namely, the
desires that belong to flesh and blood, I began to fight a hard battle
against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind
to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it,