"If thou wilt be a philosopher or naturalist and search into God's being in Nature and discern how it all came to pass, then pray to God for the Holy Spirit to enlighten thee. In thy flesh and blood thou art not able to apprehend it, but dost read it as if a mist were before thy eyes. In the Holy Spirit alone, and in the whole Nature out of which all things were made, canst thou search into Nature."--_Aurora_, ii. 15-17. One idea underlies everything which Boehme has written, namely, that nobody can successfully "search into visible Nature," or can say anything true about Man or about the problem of good and evil, until he has "apprehended _the whole Nature out of which all things were made_." It will not do, he thinks, to make the easy assumption that in the beginning the world was made out of nothing. "If God made all things out of nothing," he says, "then the visible world would be no revelation of Him, for it would have nothing of Him in it. He would still be off beyond and outside, and would not be known in this world. Persons however learned they may be, who hold such 'opinions' have never opened the Gates of God."[1] Behind the visible universe and in it there is an invisible universe; behind the material universe and in it there is an immaterial universe; behind the temporal universe and in it there is an eternal universe, and the first business of the philosopher or naturalist, as Boehme conceives it, is to discover the essential Nature of this invisible, immaterial, eternal universe out of which this fragment of a visible world has come forth. {173} Need have we, Sore need, of stars that set not in mid storm, Lights that outlast the lightnings.[2]