Christ, to the state of Adam
before he fell. The creation was opened to me; and it was showed me
how all things had their names given them, according to their nature
and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practise
physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtue of things
were so opened to me by the Lord. . . . The admirable works of
creation and the virtues thereof may be known through the openings of
that divine Word of Wisdom and power by which they were made."[36]

Jacob Boehme had, as we have seen, a similar experience of having "the
nature and virtues of things opened" to him in the year 1600. The
following account of it was given in Sparrow's Introduction to _Forty
Questions_, printed in 1647: "He went forth into the fields and there
perceived the wonderful or wonder works of the Creator in the
signatures, shapes, figures, and qualities or properties of all created
things very clearly and plainly laid open. Whereupon he was filled
with exceeding joy." The same incident is told in a slightly different
way in Justice Hotham's _Life of Behmen_: "Going abroad into the
Fields, to a Green before Neys-Gate, at Gorlitts, he there sate down,
and viewing the Herbs and Grass of the Field, in his Inward Light he
saw into their essences, use and properties." It was, further, a
fundamental idea of Boehme's that the outward and visible world is a
parable and symbol of the spiritual world within, and that by a
spiritual experience which carries the soul down to the inner, hidden,
abysmal Centre, the secrets and mysteries of the outward creation may
become revealed. Hotham says that Boehme, by his divine Light, "beheld
the whole of creation, and from that Fountain of Revelation wrote his
book _De signatura rerum_."[37] Ellistone, in the Introduction to
Boehme's _Epistles_, printed in 1649, predicts {223} that an
experience, like this one which Fox claimed, will come to those who
receive the inner Divine Light. "This knowledge," he says, "must
advance all Arts and Sciences and conduce to the attainment of the
Universal Tincture and Signature, whereby the different secret
qualities and vertues that are hid in all visible and corporeall
things, as Metals, Minerals, Plants and Herbes, may be drawne forth and
applied to their right naturall use _for the curing and healing_ of
corrupt and decayed nature."[38]

It was also a feature of Boehme's teaching that man must enter again
into Paradise