[52] _Theosoph. Quest._ iii. 2-4. {190} CHAPTER XI JACOB BOEHME'S "WAY OF SALVATION" "I will write a Process or Way which I myself have gone."[1] Most writers who have treated of Boehme have mainly dealt with his _Weltanschauung_--his theosophical view of the Abyss and the worlds of time and eternity,--or they have devoted themselves to descriptions of his type of mysticism.[2] His important permanent contribution to Christianity is, however, to be found in his interpretation of the way, or, as he calls it, the process of salvation. Very much that he wrote about the procession of the universe is capricious and subjective. His interpretations of Genesis, and of Old Testament Scripture in general, are thoroughly uncritical and of value only as they reveal his own mind and his occasional flashes of insight. But his accounts of his own _experience_ and his message of the way to God possess an elemental and universal value, and belong among the precious words of the prophets of the race. His Way of Salvation is in direct line with the central ideas of Denck, Buenderlin, Entfelder, Franck, Schwenckfeld, and Weigel; that is, his emphasis is always, as was theirs, upon the native divine possibilities of the soul, upon the fact of a spiritual environment in immediate correspondence and co-operation with the soul, and upon the necessity of personal and inward experience as the key to every gate of life; but he puts more stress even than Schwenckfeld did {191} upon the epoch-making new birth, and he sees more in the Person of Christ as the way of salvation than any of the spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century had seen, while his own personal experience was so unique and illuminating, so profound and transforming, that he was able to speak on divine things with a grasp and insight and with a spiritual authority beyond that attained by any of the reformers in this group. He has given, I think, as profound and as simple, and at the same time as vital an interpretation of salvation through Christ as the Reformation movement produced before the nineteenth century, and much that he said touches the very core of what seems to us to-day to be the heart of the Gospel, the central fact of mature religion.[3]