Chapter 20

came, saying, Behold, I am God's Eternal Virgin, Wisdom, whom thou hast been enquiring after. I am to unseal the Treasures of God's deep Wisdom unto thee. . . . Wisdom shall be born in the inward parts of thy soul." Three days later, "the same Figure in greater Glory did appear, with a crown upon her head, full of majesty, saying, Behold me as thy Mother and know thou art to enter into covenant, to obey the New-Creation laws that shall be revealed unto thee."[61] In her account of the following extraordinary experience there are many marks of Boehme's influence: "I retained no strength, my Sun of Reason and the Moon of my outward sense were folded up and withdrew. I knew nothing by myself, as {229} to those working properties from Nature and Creature, and the wheel of the Motion standing still, another [influence] moved from a central Fire, so that I felt myself transmuted into one pure flame. Then came that Word to me, 'This is no other than the Gate to my Eternal Deep.'"[62]

Pordage's main contribution to the exposition of "Behmenism" was a book published in 1683 and entitled, _Theologia Mystica, or the Mystic Divinitie of the Eternal Invisibles_. It is the work of a confused mind, and its spiritual penetration, as also its mastery of the English language, are of a low order. The marks of Boehme's influence appear everywhere in the book, though Pordage is quite incapable of comprehending the more profound and robust features of Boehme's philosophy. What he relates professes to be what he himself has _seen_ in visions, 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 with great boldness, as deeming themselves to have arrived to Perfection and so visibly distinguishing themselves from all the rest, and I said, Now surely the anointed of the Lord is before Him. But a Voice said, Neither are these they; for the Lord seeth not as man seeth."[66]

A third and intellectually far greater member of this group of "Behmenists" was Francis Lee, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, a student in Leyden University, and a man of splendid parts. He became acquainted with the movement while in Holland, and on his return home sought out Jane Leade, became her adopted son, and, later, on the strength of a "revelation" made to his {231} spiritual mother, he married her daughter. Until the time of Jane Leade's death in 1704, he was her devoted disciple, writing for her in the period of her blindness, and editing and publishing many of her books. He was the moving spirit in the formation of "the Philadelphian Society" for the propagation of the mystical ideas of the followers of Boehme--a Society which existed from 1697 to 1703, and which had a far-reaching influence not only in England but still more on the Continent of Europe.[67]

John Anderdon, an interesting Quaker pamphleteer, born in 1624, convinced of the Truth of the Quaker Message by the preaching of Francis Howgil in 1658, and for many years a prisoner for his faith, for which he finally died in prison, furnishes in his attack on the "Behmenists" in 1661 the earliest data available for an estimate of their views and practices.[68] The writer has evidently read the works of Jacob Boehme, or at least some of them, and he contends that the "Behmenists" whom he is attacking have failed to understand the writings of their master and have never fathomed "the tendencie of his spirit": "The Conclusion which you have drawn to yourselves from his Writings will not profit you; neither doth it make you any jot the more excellent, that ye can talk much of him and his Books and Writings, being not come to the right Spirit in which is life, which brings men out of dead Forms."[69]

His main criticism of the little sect is that its members make use of "Mediums and borrowed Instruments for the conveyance of God's Grace and Virtue into the Soul,"[70] and that they have "not come to the Light which gives {232} a true understanding of the things of God," though he admits that there "was sometime" in them "a hungering and thirsting after Righteousness."[71] These "Mediums" are evidently the Water of Baptism and the Bread and Wine of the Supper--"Ordinances," he says, "as you call them."[72] It would seem from this Quaker Pamphlet that the "Behmenists" under review were much like the followers of Fox, except only that they continued to use the sacraments. This use of "Mediums" seemed to him indicate that they were "out of the Light" and "trying to _cover_ the serpent's head," instead of stamping on it, but Anderdon would not have written his _Blow at Babel_ if he had not been impressed with the general marks of likeness in other respects between the "Behmenists" and his own people.

Another interesting Quaker document furnishes a glimpse of the "Behmenists" a dozen years later--at about the period when John Pordage and Jane Leade were beginning to "wait together in prayer and pure meditation." It is a Minute adopted by the London "Morning Meeting" of Friends, "the 21st of ye 7th Month 1674." The occasion for action was the reception of "an Epistle to the Behminists," written by Ralph Frettwell of Barbadoes, at an earlier period "one of the Chief Judges of the Court of Common-pleas" in the island. He had been stirred to write for the same reason that impelled Anderdon, and his "Epistle" called these partly spiritualized people, as he believed, to the fuller Light, and warned them against the use of Baptism, and Bread and Wine, and "the Pater Noster." The Minute of the Morning Meeting, which opens with the words: "Deare freind R. F. in the Truth that never changeth but changeth all who believe and obey it," records the decision of the Meeting not to publish the Epistle, "wee haveing well weighed it in the feare of God and in tender Care of Truth." The reason given in the Minutes for not publishing the "Epistle" is, first, that "the writings of J. B. reveal {233} a great mixture of light and darkness," and indicate that he lived sometimes in the power of one and sometimes in the power of the other, that God Himself has tried and judged the Spirit of darkness, and that the Spirit of Light has already "come to its own Centre and flows forth again purely"--presumably in the Quaker movement.[73] As the Lord Himself has given judgment and has given victory to the Principle of the Light, the publication of the "Epistle" is unnecessary.

And, secondly, Frettwell, in calling the "Behmenists" from "the use of Mediums," admits that at an earlier period of his life, before he received the full Light, he "received light and peace" through these external things. This seemed to the Meeting "too much giveing them encouragement" to dwell in things which give "only drynesse and barrenness," and they fear that "the ffoxes among them would take advantage" of this aid and comfort.[74] It would appear that the gravamen of the Quaker attack on the little sect was the failure of its members to dispense with sacraments. At a later period, when the "Philadelphian Society" was in full flower, an old-time pillar Quaker, George Keith, then become a Churchman and "an apostate" in the eyes of Friends, attacked the writings of Jane Leade on the ground that "she wrote derogatory to the Humanity of Christ," _i.e._ the historical Christ. Francis Lee took up vigorously the defence, and told George Keith that he himself had taught again and again the same principle of inward Light and inward Religion, that he had never yet publicly renounced these early ideas of his, and that he of all men ought to understand the meaning of a Christ within and of a "Still Eternity."[75]

Traces of Boehme's influence appear in the terms and {234} ideas of many English writers during the period under consideration, besides those specifically mentioned. Sir Isaac Newton read Boehme's books with great appreciation and meditated upon those strange accounts of the invisible universe which underlies and is in the visible world, but we need not take too seriously the claim of the "Behmenists" that "he was ploughing with Behmen's heifer" when he discovered the law of universal gravitation![76] Milton, without any doubt, had read the German mystic's account of the eternal war between the Light Principle and the Dark Principle, of the fall of Lucifer, of the loss of Paradise, and of the return of man in Christ to Paradise, and there are many passages in the great poet which look decidedly like germinations from the seed which Boehme sowed, but we must observe caution in tracing the origin of verses written by a poet of Milton's genius and originality and range of knowledge. One great Englishman of a later period, William Law, unmistakably owed to Jacob Boehme the main influences which transformed his life, and through the pure and lucid style of this noble English mystic of the eighteenth century, Boehme's insights found a new interpretation and a clearer expression than he himself or any other interpreter had been able to give them.[77]

[1] "The Life of one Jacob Boehmen, who although he was a meane man, yet wrote the most wonderful deepe knowledge in Naturall and Divine Things, that any hath been known to doe since the Apostles' Times, and yet never read them or learned them from any other man, as may be scene in that which followeth."--London, 1644, printed by L. N. for Richard Whitaker.

[2] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge edition, 1911), i. p. 18.

[3] Preface, A. 4.

[4] _Ibid._

[5] _Journ._ i. p. 29.

[6] _The Life of Jacob Behmen_, written by Durant Hotham, Esquire, November 7, 1653. Printed for H. Blunden, and sold at the Castle in Corn Hill, 1654.

[7] _Life of Jacob Behmen_, B. 2.

[8] _Op. cit._ B. 2.

[9] The writings were translated in the following order: In 1647, _Forty Questions_ by Sparrow; _The Clavis_, by Sparrow. In 1648, _The Three Principles_, by Sparrow; _The Way to Christ_ (including the Treatises, _On True Repentance_; _On True Resignation_; _On Regeneration_; _The Supersensual Life_; and _On Illumination_), by Sparrow. In 1649, _Of the Last Times_, by Sparrow; _Epistles of Jacob Behmen_, by Ellistone. In 1650, _The Three-fold Life_, by Sparrow. In 1651, _De signatura rerum_, by Ellistone. In 1652, _Christ's Testaments_--Baptism and Supper,--by Sparrow. In 1654, _The Mysterium magnum_, by Ellistone and Sparrow; _A Table of the Divine Manifestation_, by H. Blunden and Sparrow; _A Table of the Three Principles_, H. Blunden and Sparrow; _An Epitome of the Three Principles_, by Sparrow. In 1655, _On Predestination_, by Sparrow; _A Short Compendium on Repentance_, by Sparrow. In 1656, _The Aurora_, by Sparrow. In 1659, _The Treatise on the Incarnation_, by Sparrow. In 1661, _The Great Six Points_; _The Earthly and Heavenly Mystery_; _The Four Complexions_; _Two Apologies to Tylcken_; _Considerations concerning Stiefel's Threefold State of Man_; _An Apology concerning Perfection_; _On Divine Contemplation_; _An Apology for the Books on True Repentance and True Resignation_; _177 Theosophic Questions_; _The Holy Week_; _25 Epistles_, by Sparrow.

[10] Sparrow refers to this book in his Introduction to _The Three Principles_ as follows: "For a taste of the Spirit of prophecy which the author [Boehme] had, there is a little treatise of some prophecies concerning these latter times, collected out of his writings by a lover of the Teutonic philosophy and entitled Mercurius Teutonicus."

[11] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.

[12] Introd. to _Forty Questions_.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Introd. to _The Three Princ._

[16] Introd. to _The Three Princ._

[17] Ibid.

[18] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._

[19] "To the Reader" in _Myst. mag._

[20] Preface to the Reader in _Aurora_.

[21] Preface for the _Aurora_.

[22] Preface for the _Aurora_.

[23] A contemporary of Sparrow, probably Samuel Pordage, wrote an Encomium on Sparrow in the Introduction to a long Behmenite Poem called _Mundorum explicatio_ (London, 1661). The passage is as follows:

"And learned Sparrow we thy praises too Will Sing; rewards too small for what is due, The Gifts of Glory and of Praise we owe: The English Behmen doth Thy Trophies show. Whilst Englishmen that great saint's praise declare, Thy Name shall join'd with his receive a share. The Time shall come when his great Name shall rise, Thy Glory also shall ascend the skies. Thou mad'st him English speak, or else what Good Had his works done us if not understood? To Germany they beneficial prove Alone: till we enjoyed them by thy Love. Their German Robes thou took'st from them, that we Their Beauties might in English Garments see. Thus has thy Love a vast rich Treasure showen, And made what was exotic now our own."

[24] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_ (1649).

[25] Preface to Boehme's _Epistles_.

[26] _Ibid._

[27] _Ibid._

[28] Preface to _Epistles_.

[29] _Ibid._

[30] Preface to _Sig. re._

[31] This question was raised by Barclay in his _Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_ (London, 1879), pp. 214-215.

[32] Thomas Taylor's _Works_ (London, 1697), p. 86.

[33] The writings themselves constantly use the word "Seeker," and the Introductions emphasize the Seeking attitude.

[34] _Christian Information Concerning these Last Times_, by F. E. (London, 1664), pp. 10-11.

[35] _Op. cit._ pp. 11-12.

[36] _Journal_ (ed. 1901), 28. Unfortunately the Cambridge Journal does not contain any biographical incidents prior to 1652.

[37] Hotham's _Life_, D. 4.

[38] Preface to _Epistles_, p. 10.

[39] The _Three Princ._, trans. 1648, xx. 40-41.

[40] _Sig. re._ viii. 23.

[41] _Ep._ xv. 18. For another passage on "the new smell," see _The Three Princ._ iv. 27.

[42] _Journal_, i. p. 29.

[43] _Ibid._ i. pp. 29-30.

[44] See _Journal_, i. pp. 31-34.

[45] _Ibid._ i. p. 33.

[46] _Op. cit._ A.

[47] See, for specimen passages, _Journal_, i. pp. 36 and 124.

[48] See especially _Myst. mag._ xxxviii. sections 52-59.

[49] Preface to _Aurora_, B.

[50] _Journal_, i. p. 19.

[51] _Three Princ._ xvi. 31-37.

[52] See _Journal_, i. p. 13; pp. 190-191 and _passim_.

[53] _Three Princ._ iv. 5. See also _ibid._ xv. 24; xvi. 42; and xviii. 24.

[54] _Journal_, i. p. 12.

[55] _Three Princ._ ix. 25-26.

[56] _Ibid._ xix. 33.

[57] _Myst. mag._ lxii. 17 and lxiii. 36.

[58] See Fox's _Journal_, i. p. 19.

[59] _Reliquiae Baxterianae_ (London, 1715), i. 77.

[60] _A Fountain of Gardens_, 4 vols., London, 1696-1701.

[61] _Op. cit._ i. pp. 17-19.

[62] _A Fountain of Gardens_, p. 25.

[63] _Theologia mystica_, p. 81.

[64] Christopher Walton, in his _Notes and Materials_ (1854), gives a list of eighteen of her books.

[65] _Ibid._ p. 238.

[66] _Op. cit._ p. 9. Pordage disliked the Quakers and speaks slightingly of them in _Theologia mystica_. He also wrote a Treatise against them. See Walton, p. 203.

[67] Important material on this subject may be found in Walton's _Notes and Materials_, especially pp. 188-258.

[68] The full title-page of Anderdon's book is as follows: _One Blow at Babel_. In those of the Pepole called Behemnites, whose Foundation is not upon that of the Prophets and Apostles, which shall stand sure and firm forever; but upon their own carnal conceptions, begotten in their Imaginations upon Jacob Behmen's writings: They not knowing the better part, the Teachings of that Spirit that sometime opened some Mysteries of God's Kingdom in Jacob, have chosen the worser part in Esau, according to the predominancy of that Spirit which ruled in them when they made choice of their Religion, as it doth in others the hearts of the children of disobedience.--By John Anderdon. (London, printed in the year 1662, written in 1661).

[69] _One Blow at Babel_, p. 3.

[70] _Ibid._ pp. 1 and 6.

[71] _One Blow at Babel_, pp. 1-2.

[72] Jane Leade's writings give great importance to the outward sacraments.

[73] The use of the phrase "its own Centre," which became an important Quaker term, is an interesting relic of Boehme's influence.

[74] _Minutes of the Morning Meeting_, i. George Fox apparently asked to see Frattwell's MS., for in a Letter under date of eighth mo. 1st, 1674, Alexander Parker writes to George Fox: "I likewise spoke to Edw. Man [Edward Mann] to send down Ralph ffrettwells Book, I suppose he intends to see thee shortly and if he can find ye Book to bring itt with him."--_Journal_ (Cambridge edition), ii. p. 305.

[75] Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 227 and 231.

[76] See Walton's _Notes and Materials_, pp. 3, 46, 72, and 404.

[77] William Law lies beyond the period to which this volume is devoted. It is customary to call the edition of Behmen's _Works_, published 1764-1781, "William Law's Edition." This is quite incorrect. This edition is in the main a reprint of the earlier Translations by Sparrow and Ellistone. It was edited by George Ward, assisted by Thomas Langcake, and printed at the expense of Mrs. Hutcheson, an intimate friend of William Law.

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