And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek
and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great
authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and
even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen,
because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master
his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all
that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells
us how the readers of SCHELLING were surprised and enraptured by a wealth
of new expressions and new turns of speech in their mother tongue. But
all these belonged to Behmen, or were fashioned on the model of his
symbolical language. As it is, with all his astrology, and all his
alchemy, and all his barbarities of form and expression, I for one will
always take sides with the author of _The Serious Call_, and _The Spirit
of Prayer_, and _The Spirit of Love_, and _The Way to Divine Knowledge_,
in the disputed matter of Jacob Behmen's sanity and sanctity; and I will
continue to believe that if I had only had the scholarship, and the
intellect, and the patience, and the enterprise, to have mastered,
through all their intricacies, the Behmenite grammar and the Behmenite
vocabulary, I also would have found in Behmen all that Freher and Pordage
and Law and Walton found. Even in the short way into this great man that
I have gone, I have come upon such rare and rich mines of divine and
eternal truth that I can easily believe that they who have dug deeper
have come upon uncounted riches. 'Next to the Scriptures,' writes
William Law, 'my only book is the illuminated Behmen. For the whole
kingdom of grace and nature was opened in him. In reading Behmen I am
always at home, and kept close to the kingdom of GOD that is within me.'
'I am not young,' said CLAUDE DE ST. MARTIN, 'being now near my fiftieth
year, nevertheless I have begun to learn German, in order that I may read
this incomparable author in his own tongue. I have written some not
unacceptable books myself, but I am not worthy to unloose the shoestrings
of this wonderful man. I advise you to throw yourself into the depths of
Jacob Behmen. There is such a profundity and exaltation of truth in
them, and such a simple and delicious nutriment.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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