, or what he has heard from celestial visitants. It has, he
says, been his privilege to taste much of that Tree of Life which grows
in the midst of the Paradise of God; to smell the difference between
heaven and hell; to have seen through the veil of nature into the
spiritual glory of eternity, to have felt "the distillations of
heavenly dew and secret touches of the Holy Ghost." Unlike his
Teutonic master, he taught (and it was also the view of Jane Leade)
that in the end Divine Love transmutes evil into good and even hell
into Paradise. One passage in his book, written in his best style,
will be sufficient to illustrate his glowing optimism: "Love is of a
transmuting and transforming Nature. The great effect of Love is to
turn all things into its own Nature, which is all goodness, sweetness,
and perfection. This is that Divine Power which turns Water into Wine,
Sorrow and Hellish Anguish into exulting and triumphing Joy; Curse into
Blessing; where it meets with a barren heathy Desart it transmutes it
into a Paradise of delights; yea, it changeth evil to good and all
imperfection into perfection. It restores that which is fallen and
degenerated to its primary Beauty, Excellence and Perfection. It is
{230} the Divine Stone, the White Stone with a Name written on it,
which none knows but him that hath it . . . the Divine Elixir whose
transforming power and efficacy nothing can withstand."[63]

His greater disciple, Jane Leade, "the enamoured woman-devotee of
Pordage," the main exponent of the Behmenist movement of this period,
was a far too voluminous writer.[64] She was a sincere, pure-minded
woman, of intense devotion, but she was a strongly emotional type of
person, and lived in a kind of permanent borderland of visions and
revelations. Her language, like that also of Pordage, is
ungrammatical, of involved style, and full of overwrought and fanciful
imagination. Christopher Walton, who in many ways respected her, calls
her writings "a huge mass of parabolicalism and idiocratic
deformity!"[64] In her _Message to the Philadelphian Society_ she
reports a curious vision from heaven which assures her that the Quakers
are not God's chosen people. There pass in review before her
illuminated sight the various claimants to the lofty title of the true
Church, the real Bride of Christ. There are Anabaptists, Fifth
Monarchy Men, and many others. "Then," she says, "did I see a body
greater than any of these come up w