It is truly a splendid day's work! But it might not have been possible even for Behmen to perform that day's work had he not for months beforehand been dealing day and night with the deepest and the most heart-searching things both of GOD and man. What a man was Jacob Behmen, and chosen to what a service! At work all that day in his solitary stall, and then all the night after over his rush-light writing for a memorial to himself and to us his incomparable _Compendium of Repentance_. In a letter addressed to one of the nobility in Silesia, and dated February 19, 1623, Behmen says: 'When you have leisure to study I shall send you something still more deep, for I have written this whole autumn and winter without ceasing.' And if he had written nothing else but his great book entitled _Mysterium Magnum_ that autumn and winter, he must have written night and day and done nothing else. Even in size the _Mysterium_ is an immense piece of work. In the English edition it occupies the whole of the third quarto volume of 507 pages; and then for its matter it is a still more amazing production. To say that the _Mysterium Magnum_ is a mystical and allegorical commentary upon the Book of Genesis is to say nothing. Philo himself is a tyro and a timid interpreter beside Jacob Behmen. 'Which things are an allegory,' says the Apostle, after a passing reference to Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael; but if you would see actually every syllable of Genesis allegorised, spiritualised, interpreted of CHRIST, and of the New Testament, from the first verse of its first chapter to the last verse of its last chapter, like the nobleman of Silesia, when you have leisure, read Behmen's deep _Mysterium Magnum_. I would recommend the enterprising and unconquerable student to make leisure so as to master Behmen's Preface to the _Mysterium Magnum_ at the very least. And if he does that, and is not drawn on from that to be a student of Behmen for the rest of his days, then, whatever else his proper field in life may be, it is not mystical or philosophical theology. It is a long step both in time and in thought from Behmen to SCHOPENHAUER; but, speaking of one of Schelling's books, Schopenhauer says that it is all taken from Jacob Behmen's _Mysterium Magnum_; every thought and almost every word of Schelling's work leads Schopenhauer to think of Behmen. 'When I read Behmen's book,' says Schopenhauer, 'I cannot withhold either admiration or emotion.' At his far too early death Behmen left four treatises behind him in an unfinished condition. The _Theoscopia_, or _Divine Vision_, is but a fragment; but, even so, the study of that fragment leads us to believe that, had Behmen lived to the ordinary limit of human life, and had his mind continued to grow as it was now fast growing in clearness, in concentration, and in simplicity, Behmen would have left to us not a few books as classical in their form as all his books are