any of the
pantheistic mystics. This sample passage will indicate his teaching:
"When thou art wholly gone forth from the creature and become nothing
to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that Eternal One
which is God Himself, and then thou shalt experience the supreme virtue
of Love."[66]

These two diverse statements are, however, not as inconsistent as they
at first seem. The _will_, the _intention_ that is a psychological
preparation for this mystical experience is a will washed and purged of
selfish impulse and self-seeking aims. It is an _intention_ that
cannot be described in terms of any finite "content." It is the
intense heave of the whole undivided being toward God with no
reservation, no calculation of return profits, no thought even of
isolated and independent personality. A true account of consciousness,
preceding the moment of bursting through the Gate, might emphasize with
equal accuracy either the "earnest resolution," "the storm and onset of
will," or "the annihilation of particular desire," "the surrender of
individualistic self-hood," "death to own will in the Life and Virtue
of Love."

The effects of such an experience as that which came to Boehme, if we
may take his case as typical, are (1) The birth of an inner conviction
of God's immediate and environing Presence amounting to axiomatic
certainty--faith through experience has become "the substance," and "is
now one spirit with God"; (2) The radiation of the whole being with "a
joy like that which parents have at the birth of their first-born
child"--the joy now of the {206} soul crying, "Abba"; (3) A vastly
heightened perception of what is involved in the eternal nature of the
religious life and in the spiritual relation between the soul and God,
_i.e._ increased ability to see what promotes and furthers the soul's
health and development; (4) A unification, co-ordination, and
centralizing of the inner faculties, so that there is an increment of
power revealed in the entire personality; and (5) An increase of
clarity and a sharpening of focus in the perception of moral
distinctions together with a distinctly heightened moral and social
passion.

Boehme himself always believed, further, that his entire system of
ideas, his philosophy of the universe, and his way of salvation were a
"revelation" of the Spirit to him,--in a word, that his wisdom was
"theosophy," a God-communicated knowledge. I have no desire to mark
off dogm