In three months after he had finished _The Three Principles_, Behmen had composed a companion treatise, entitled _The Threefold Life of Man_. Modest about himself as Behmen always was, he could not be wholly blind about his own incomparable books. And he but spoke the simple truth about his third book when he said of it--as, indeed, he was constantly saying about all his books--that it will serve every reader just according to his constellation, his inclination, his disposition, his complexion, his profession, and his whole condition. 'You will be soon weary of all contentious books,' he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you entertain and get _The Threefold Life of Man_ into your mind and heart.' 'The subject of regeneration,' says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of _The Threefold Life_, which appear to have been in great favour with Mr. Law.' Behmen's next book was a very extraordinary piece of work, and it had a very extraordinary origin. A certain BALTHAZAR WALTER, who seems to have been a second Paracelsus in his love of knowledge and in his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, had, like Paracelsus, travelled east, and west, and north, and south in search of that ancient and occult wisdom of which so many men in that day dreamed. But Walter, like his predecessor Paracelsus, had come home from his travels a humbler man, a wiser man, and a man more ready to learn and lay to heart the truth that some of his own countrymen could all the time have taught him. On his return from the east, Walter found the name of Jacob Behmen in everybody's mouth; and, on introducing himself to that little shop in Goerlitz out of which the _Aurora_ and _The Threefold Life_ had come, Walter was wise enough to see and bold enough to confess that he had found a teacher and a friend there such as neither Egypt nor India had provided him with. After many immensely interested visits to Jacob Behmen's workshop, Walter was more than satisfied that Behmen was all, and more than all, that his most devoted admirers had said he was. And, accordingly, Walter laid a plan so as to draw upon Behmen's profound and original mind for a solution of some of the philosophical and theological problems that were agitating and dividing the learned men of that day. With that view Walter made a round of the leading universities of Germany, conversed with the professors and students, collected a long list of the questions that were being debated in that day in those seats of learning, and sent the list to Behmen, asking him to give his mind to them and try to answer them. 'Beloved sir,' wrote Behmen, after three months' meditation and prayer, 'and my good friend: it is impossible for the mind and reason of man to answer all the questions you have put to me. All those things are known to GOD alone.