and return to the condition of the unfallen Adam. "The
Noble Virgin" [_i.e._ Sophia or Spiritual Wisdom], Boehme writes,
"showeth us the Gate and how we must enter again into Paradise through
the sharpness of the sword," which, in a few lines previous, he calls
"the flaming sword which God set to keep the Tree of Life."[39] Fox's
experience of the "new smell" of creation is an even more striking
parallel. Mystic awakenings and spiritual openings generally impress
the recipient of them with a sense of new and fresh penetration into
the meaning of things and leave them with a feeling of heightened
powers, but cases in which the experience results in a new sense of
_smell_ are fairly rare. Two persons might, no doubt, have such an
experience quite independently, but one who has become familiar with
the range of _suggestion_ in experiences of this type will note with
interest the large place which "new Smells and Odours" occupy in
Boehme's writings. For example, he says, in the _Signatura rerum_,
where he describes the coming of the Paradise-experience: "When
Paradise springs up, the paradisaical joy puts itself forth with a
lovely smell,"[40] and in one of his Epistles he speaks of a spiritual
awakening in his own life that was marked by a new smell--"A very
strong Odour was given to me in the life of God."[41]

There is another passage in Fox's _Journal_, a few lines {224} beyond
this famous account of his Paradise-experience, that also bears the
mark of Boehme's influence. In fact, it is difficult to believe that
Fox could have got his phraseology anywhere else than from Boehme. The
passage reads: "As people come into subjection to the Spirit of God and
grow up in the Image and Power of the Almighty, they may receive the
_Word of Wisdom that opens all things, and, come to know the hidden
Unity in the Eternal Being_."[42] Everywhere in Boehme it is "Sophia,
the Word of Wisdom," that "opens all things," and the goal of all
spiritual experience and of all divine illumination for him consists in
coming to "the hidden Unity in the Eternal Being, or the Eternal
Essence." That is not a Biblical phrase, and it is not one which the
Drayton youth would have heard from native English sources. It came to
England with the Boehme literature. Further revelations along this
same line of "opening" follow in the _Journal_. In the Vale of Beavor
the Lord "opened" things to Fox, relating to "the three great
professions in the wo