_The Way to Christ_ was Behmen's next book, and in the four precious treatises that compose that book our author takes an altogether new departure. In his _Aurora_, in _The Three Principles_, in the _Forty Questions_, and in the _Signatura Rerum_, Jacob Behmen has been writing for philosophers and theologians. Or, if in all these works he has been writing for a memorial to himself in the first place,--even then, it has been for himself on the philosophical and theological side of his own mind. But in _The Way to Christ_ he writes for himself under that character which, once taken up by Jacob Behmen, is never for one day laid down. Behmen's favourite Scripture, after our Lord's promise of the Holy Spirit to them that ask for Him, was the parable of the Prodigal Son. In all his books Behmen is that son, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but at last beginning to come to himself and to return to his Father. _The Way to Christ_ is a production of the very greatest depth and strength, but it is the depth and the strength of the heart and the conscience rather than the depth and the strength of the understanding and the imagination. This nobly evangelical book is made up of four tracts, entitled respectively, _Of True Repentance_, _Of True Resignation_, _Of Regeneration_, and _Of the Supersensual Life_. And a deep vein of autobiographic life and interest runs through the four tracts and binds them into a quick unity. 'A soldier,' says Behmen, 'who has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight.' And neither Augustine nor Luther nor Bunyan carries deeper wounds, or broader scars, nor tells a nobler story in any of their autobiographic and soldierly books than Behmen does in his _Way to Christ_. At the commencement of _The True Repentance_ he promises us that he will write of a process or way on which he himself has gone. 'The author herewith giveth thee the best jewel that he hath.' And a true jewel it is, as the present speaker will testify. If _The True Repentance_ has a fault at all it is the fault of Rutherford's _Letters_. For the taste of some of his readers Behmen, like Rutherford, draws rather too much on the language and the figures of the married life in setting forth the love of CHRIST to the espoused soul, and the love of the espoused soul to CHRIST. But with that, and all its other drawbacks, _The True Repentance_ is such a treatise that, once discovered by the proper reader, it will be the happy discoverer's constant companion all his earthly and penitential days. As the English reader is carried on through the fourth tract, _The Supersensual Life_, he experiences a new and an increasing sense of ease and pleasure, combined with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all but new to him even in Behmen's books. The new height and depth and inwardness are all Jacob Behmen's own; but the freedom and the ease and the movement and the melody are all William Law's. In his preparations