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spiritually. His angelic body and spirit were extinguished, but his soul being an immortal fire became a poor slave in prison of bestial flesh and blood.

When Adam had thus fallen it was not good for him to be alone, so God divided the first perfect human nature into two parts. Eve was created, or rather taken out of Adam. She led him further astray by eating of the forbidden fruit, and persuading him also to eat of it. He saw that he was naked; that he was an animal of gross flesh and blood, and he was ashamed of his bestial body. That man was created at first male and female in one person, and that his offspring was to be continued after the manner of his own birth from God, Law endeavours to prove not only from the record in Genesis, but from the words of our Lord to the Sadducees that "in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven," or as S. Luke has it, "they are equal to the angels of God," which is supposed to mean that the state of angelic being, which Adam had before he sinned, will be again restored to humanity.

That the original substance of humanity was Divine is evident from the record of creation, where it is said that God breathed into man the breath of lives,' and he became a living soul. That soul did not come from the womb of nothing, but as a breath from the mouth of God. What it is and what it has in itself is from and out of the First and Highest of all beings. To this record in Genesis S. Paul appeals where he wishes to show that all things, all worlds, and all living creatures were not created out of nothing. The woman, he says, was created out of the man, but all things are out of God. Again, he says that there is to us but one God, out of whom are all things. Creation out of nothing is a fiction of modern theology, a fiction big with the greatest absurdities. Every creature is a birth from something else. Birth is the only procedure of nature. All nature is itself a birth from God; the first manifestation of the hidden inconceivable God. So far is it from being out of nothing, that it is the manifestation of that in God which before was not manifest, and as nature is the manifestation of God so are all creatures the manifestation of the powers of nature. Those creatures that are nearest to God are out of the highest powers of nature. The spiritual materiality, or the element of heaven, produces the bodies, or heavenly flesh and blood of the angels, just as the elements of this world produce material flesh and blood. The spiritual materiality of heaven, in the kingdom of the fallen

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angels, has gone through a variety of births or creations, till some of it came down to the grossness of air and water, and the hardness of rocks and stones.

A spark of the light and spirit of God is still in man. It has a strong and natural tendency towards the eternal light from which it came. This light is Christ in us. He is the woman's seed who from the beginning has been bruising the serpent's head. He did not begin to be a Saviour when He was born of Mary, for He is the eternal Word that has ever been in the hearts of men; the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He is our Emmanuel, the God with us given unto Adam, and through him to all his offspring. To turn to the light and spirit within us is the only true turning to God. The Saviour of the world lies hid in man, for in the depth of the soul the Holy Trinity brought forth its own living image in the first created man, who was a living representation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This was the Kingdom of God within him, and this made paradise without him. At the fall, man lost this Deity within him, but from the moment that God treasured up in Adam the Bruiser of the serpent, all the riches of the Divine nature came seminally back to him again, so that our own good spirit is the very Spirit of God.

The Christ within us, is that Christ whom we crucify. Adam and Eve were His first murderers. Eating of the earthly tree, was the death of the Christ of God,-the divine life in the soul of man. Christ would not have come into the world as the second Adam had He not been the life and perfection of the first Adam. God's delight in any creature is just as His well-beloved Son, the express image of His person, is found in that creature. This is true of angels as well as of men, for the angels need no redemption only because the life of Christ dwells in them.

The work of Christ is not to reconcile or appease an angry God. There is no wrath in God. He is an immutable will to all good. The reconciliation is to turn man from the bestial life, from nature which is without God. The effect of the fall of the angels was to deprive nature of God, that is to say, angels and fallen man turned to nature without God. Nature in itself is a desire, a universal want, which must be filled with God who is the Universal All. In this desire is a will to have something which it has not, and which it cannot seize. In the endeavour after what it seeks, it begets resistance. From these two properties arises a third which is called the 'wheel' or 'whirling

NATURE WITHOUT GOD.

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anguish of life.' These three great laws of matter and nature are seen in the attraction, equal resistance, and orbicular motion of the planets. Their existence as pointed out by Jacob Böhme has since been demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton. These three properties were never to have been seen or known by any creature. Their denseness, and strife, and darkness were brought forth by God, in union with the light, and glory, and majesty of heaven, and only for this end, that God might be manifested in them. Nor could they have been known, nor the nature of any creature as it is in itself without God, had not the rebel angels turned their desire backward to search and find the original ground of life. This turning of their desire into the origin of life was their turning from the light of God. They discovered a new kind of substantiality; nature fallen from God. To these three properties are added other four; fire; the form of light and love; sound or understanding; and the state of peace and joy into which these are brought, which state is called the seventh property of nature. The fourth, fifth, and sixth, express the existence of the Deity in the first three properties of nature. Böhme explains the first chapter of Genesis, as a manifestation of the seven properties in the creation of this material temporal system; the last of which properties is the state of repose, the joyful Sabbath of the Deity. As Adam failed to be the restoring angel it was necessary that God should become man, "take a birth in fallen nature, be united to it and become the life of it, or the natural man must of all necessity be for ever and ever in the hell of his own hunger, anguish, contrariety, and self-torment; and all for this plain reason, because nature is and can be nothing else but this variety of self-torment, till the Deity is manifested and dwelling in it.'

It

From this doctrine followed of necessity the perpetual inspiration of the human race. God lives and works in man. is by His inspiration that we think those things that be good. It is not confined to individuals, nor given only on special occasions. The true Word of God is not the sacred writings, but the in-spoken living Word in the soul. The law was the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, and the New Testament is but another schoolmaster-a light, like that of prophecy, to which we are to give heed until Christ the dawning of the day, or the day star, arise in our hearts. The sons of wisdom in the heathen world, were enlightened by the Spirit and Word of God. Christ was born in them. They were the Apostles of the Christ within, commissioned to call mankind from the pursuits of flesh and blood

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INSPIRATION PERPETUAL AND UNIVERSAL.

to know themselves, the dignity of their nature, and the immortality of their souls.*

Dean Stanley, in his Lectures on the Eastern Church, has expressed a wish that some historian would arise "who would trace the history of Alexandrian theology from its first dawning among the Greek Fathers to its influence on John Wesley." Such a historian would have an interesting and hitherto untrodden field. His history would be that of almost every manifestation of earnest religion in the Christian world. Law took the form of his theology from Böhme, but in substance it was Alexandrian. Wesley's theology was eclectic. It did not take the same form as Law's, but the really earnest part of it he had in common with Law.

The authorities for the first part of this Chapter are Dr. Ullmann's Reformers before the Reformation; Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics; Tauler's Sermons and the Theologia Germanica, both translated into English by Susannah Winkworth; Schrader's Angelus Silesius und seine Mystik; and Upham's Life of Madame Guyon. This accouut of Böhme's Theology is derived almost verbally from Böhme's Aurora, De Tribus Principiis, and the Mysterium Magnum in Schiebler's edition of Böhme's Sämmtliche Werke, with William Law's translation of Böhme's Works. The exposition of Law's Theology is founded on his Way to Divine Knowledge, his Spirit of Prayer, and his Spirit of Love. A valuable collection of Theosophical writings to which the writer of this has been greatly indebted, is a Memorial of Law, Jacob Böhme, and other Theosophers by Christopher Walton (London, 1854, printed for private circulation.) The writer has been duly warned by Mr. Walton that what is here written on Jacob Böhme is a mass of confusion, and that he must study Böhme for the next seven years before he can get "an intellectual glimpse of the great landscape," for " Böhme can not be touched by blind reason and mere earthly understanding." Mr. Walton is preparing a work in elucidation of "Böhme's seven properties of the centre of nature, or the first eternal mathematical point of mental essence." He says that" the discourses of Böhme profess to be a strict demonstration from the very essence, or ground of being of the several subjects they profess to treat of being, in short, a fundamental demonstration of Christianity."

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CHAPTER XI.

SUFEYISM.

THE only religion in the world in which we should have concluded, before examination, that the Pantheistic spirit was impossible, is the religion of Mahomet. Islamism is repellant of all speculation about God, and all exercise of reason in matters pertaining to faith. The supreme God of the Arabian prophet was not a Being from whom all things emanated, and whom men were to serve by contemplation, but an absolute Will whom all creation was to obey. He was separated from everything, above everything, the Ruler of all things, the Sovereign of the universe. It was the mission of Moses to teach the unity of God in opposition to the idolatry of the nations which, through beholding the worshipful in nature, had put the created in the place of the Creator. For this purpose all images of the Divine Being were forbidden to the Hebrews, yet their prophets made use of all the glories of creation to set forth the Divine Majesty and the splendor of God. His chariots were fire. He walked on the wings of the wind. He clothed Himself with light as with a garment. He was in heaven and on earth, and in the uttermost parts of the sea, yea even in hell. Neither matter, suffering nor impurity excluded Him from any region of the universe. Jesus Christ, even more than the Hebrew prophets, directed His disciples to the natural world that He might show them the Father; nor did He hesitate to point to natural objects as symbols of God and emblems of His glory. S. John tells us of the rapture with which he delighted to repeat the message he heard from Jesus that God is Light;' and in setting forth the Divinity of the Logos he pronounced this light to be the life of men.' Mahometanism was at least as clear in its doctrine of the Divine Unity as either Judaism or Christianity, and more rigid than either of these in excluding nature from any place in religion. It recognized no symbols. It learned nothing of God from creation. The Supreme One had spoken by His prophet, and His word was the essence of religion. Again, Mahometanism is a religion of dogmas and ceremonies. It rests on authority. Its doctrines are definite. The Koran is infallible; the words are not only inspired but dictated in Heaven. To find Pantheism

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