p in a Synodical
Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations
of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not
forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural
desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry
nurses" in the Church have "brought us to such a dwarfish stature,"
{213} and he prays that the merciful God may teach at least one nation
a better way than that of "muzzling" the bringer of fresh light.

Much more important, however, for the dissemination of Boehme's ideas
in England was the patient and faithful work of John Sparrow who, in
collaboration with his kinsman, John Ellistone, translated into English
the entire body of Boehme's writings, between the years 1647 and
1661.[9] Sparrow was born at Stambourne in Essex in 1615. He was
admitted to the Inner Court in 1633 and subsequently called to the Bar.
He was probably the author of a widely-read book, published in 1649,
under the title of _Mercurius Teutonicus_, consisting of a series of
"propheticall passages" from Boehme.[10] His outer life was
uneventful; his inner life is revealed in his Introductions to the
Boehme Translations. He begins his long series of Translations with
the testimony that the writings of this author have "so very much
satisfied" his own soul that he wants others to be partakers of the
same source of light, though he warns his readers that their own souls
must come by experience into the condition Boehme himself was in before
they can fully understand him.[11] He is profoundly impressed, {214}
as his great contemporary, Milton, was, with the strange birth of new
sects "now sprung up in England," but he hopes that "goodness will get
the upper hand and that the fruits of the spirit will prevail," and his
mind "is led to think" that through Boehme's message, which has been
very beneficial in other nations, "our troubled, doubting souls in
England may receive much Comfort, leading to that inward Peace which
passeth all understanding, and that all disturbing sects and
heresies . . . will be made to vanish and cease."[12]

Sparrow was deeply impressed with two of Boehme's central ideas, and he
gives expression to them, in his own quaint and peculiar way, in almost
every one of his Introductions--(1) the idea that the visible is a
parable of the Invisible, and (2) the idea that God manifests Himself
within men. In the very first of the Introductions both of