This insistence on personal, first-hand experience and practice of the Christ-Life, as the ground of true religion, {171} is the fundamental feature of Boehme's Christianity. He travels, as we shall see, through immense heights and deeps. Like Dante, who immeasurably surpasses him in power of expression, but not in prophetic power of vision, he saw the eternal realities of heaven and hell and the world between, and he told as well as he could what he _saw_, but his practical message which runs like a thread through all his writings is always simple--almost childlike in its simplicity--"Thou must thyself be the way. The spiritual understanding must be born in thee."[59] "A Christian is a new creature in the ground of the heart."[60] "The Kingdom of God is not from without, but it is a new man, who lives in love, in patience, in hope, in faith and in the Cross of Jesus Christ."[61] And this simple shoemaker of Goerlitz, with his amazing range of thought and depth of experience, practised and embodied the way of life which he recommended. He was a good man, and his life touches us even now with a kind of awe. "Life," he once said, "is a strange bath of thorns and thistles,"[62] and he himself experienced that "bath," but he went through the world hearing everywhere a divine music and "having a joy in his heart which made his whole being tremble and his soul triumph as if it were in God."[63] [1] I have used as primary source the German edition of Boehme's Works--_Theosophia revelata_--published in 1730 in 8 vols. All my references are to the English translations made by Sparrow, Ellistone, and Blunden, 1647-61. These translations were republished, 1764, in 4 vols. in an edition which has incorrectly been called William Law's edition. Four volumes have been republished by John M. Watkins of London, as follows: _The Threefold Life of Man_, 1909; _The Three Principles_, 1910; _The Forty Questions_ and _The Clavis_, 1911; and _The Way to Christ_, 1911. The _Signatura rerum_, in English, has been published in "Everyman's Library." A valuable volume of selections from "Jacob Behmen's Theosophic Philosophy" was made by Edward Taylor, London, 1691. Many volumes of selections have been published in recent years. The books on Boehme which I have found most suggestive and helpful are the following: Franz von Baader's "Vorlesungen und Erlaeuterungen ueber J. Boehme's Lehre," _Werke_ (Leipzig, 1852), vol. iii. [edition of 1855, vol. xiii.]; Emile Boutroux, _Le Philosophe allemand_ (Paris, 1888): translated into English by Rothwell in Boutroux's _Historical Studies in Philosophy_ (London, 1912), pp. 169-233; Hans Lassen Martensen's _Jacob Boehme_ (translated from the Danish by T. Rhys Evans, London, 1885); Franz Hartmann's _Life and Doctrine of Jacob Boehme_ (London, 1891); Von Harless' _Jacob Boehme und die Alchymisten_ (Leipzig, 1882); Ederheimer's _Jakob Boehme und die Romantiker_ (Heidelberg, 1901); Paul Deussen's _Jacob Boehme_--an