Faith, which is always the key-word in any person's interpretation of Christianity, is for Boehme a dynamic process of appropriating Christ, and of re-living Him. "Faith," he writes in his treatise on _The Incarnation_, {196} "is not historical knowledge for a man to make articles of it and to depend on them, but faith is one spirit with God, it is the activity of God; it is free, but only for the right and for pure Love, in which it draws the breath of its power and strength. It is, finally, itself the substance."[32] Faith is, thus, not knowledge, it is not believing facts of history, it is not accepting metaphysical dogma. It is, as he is never weary of saying, "strong earnestness of spirit," the earnest will to live in the inward and eternal, passionate hunger and thirst for God, and finally the act of receiving Christ into the soul as a present power and spirit to live by. "I must die," he wrote, "with my outward man [the man of self-centred will] in Christ's death and arise and live anew in Him. Therefore I live now by the will of faith in the spirit of Christ and receive Christ with His humanity into my will. He makes through me a manifestation of the spiritual world and introduces the true Love-sound into the harp-strings of my life. He became that which I am, and now He has made me that which He is!"[33] Another word for this efficacious and dynamic Faith is "Birth" or "innermost Birth," by which Boehme means the act of discovering the Gate to the Heart and Love and Light of God, and of entering it. "The Son of God, the Eternal Word of the Father, the Glance and Brightness and Power of Eternal Light must become man and _be born in you_; otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping."[34] "If thou art born of God, then within the circle of thy own life is the whole undivided Heart of God."[35] It is a transforming event by which one swings over from life in the outer to life in the inner world, from life in the dark world to life in the light world, and is born into the kingdom, or principle, which Christ revealed in His triumphant spiritual Life. The human spirit, by this innermost Birth, reaches the principle of Life by which Christ lived, and the gate into heaven is opened and paradise is in the soul. In a {197} beautiful passage he says: "This birth must be wrought within you. The Heart, or the Son of God must arise in the birth of your life, and then you are in Christ and He is in you, and all that He and the Father have is yours; and as the Son is one with the Father, so also the new man is one with the Father and with the Son, one virtue, one power, one light, one life, one eternal paradise, one enduring substance, one Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and thou His child!"[36] God is no longer conceived as far away. He is now with His Love and Light as near as the soul is to itself, and the joy of being born in Christ is like the joy of parents