Two points stand out clearly as central ideas of Justice Hotham's Christianity. The first one is that religion is an inward affair. "God," he declares, "hath sent this last Generation a plain, uncouth Message, bidding man to fight, telling him that he shall have a Heaven, a Joy, a Paradise, a Land, a Territory, a Kingship--but that _all this is in himself, the Land to be won is himself_."[8] The second one is that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry nurses" in the Church have "brought us to such a dwarfish stature," {213} and he prays that the merciful God may teach at least one nation a better way than that of "muzzling" the bringer of fresh light. Much more important, however, for the dissemination of Boehme's ideas in England was the patient and faithful work of John Sparrow who, in collaboration with his kinsman, John Ellistone, translated into English the entire body of Boehme's writings, between the years 1647 and 1661.[9] Sparrow was born at Stambourne in Essex in 1615. He was admitted to the Inner Court in 1633 and subsequently called to the Bar. He was probably the author of a widely-read book, published in 1649, under the title of _Mercurius Teutonicus_, consisting of a series of "propheticall passages" from Boehme.[10] His outer life was uneventful; his inner life is revealed in his Introductions to the Boehme Translations. He begins his long series of Translations with the testimony that the writings of this author have "so very much satisfied" his own soul that he wants others to be partakers of the same source of light, though he warns his readers that their own souls must come by experience into the condition Boehme himself was in before they can fully understand him.[11] He is profoundly impressed, {214} as his great contemporary, Milton, was, with the strange birth of new sects "now sprung up in England," but he hopes that "goodness will get the upper hand and that the fruits of the spirit will prevail," and his mind "is led to think" that through Boehme's message, which has been very beneficial in other nations, "our troubled, doubting souls in England may receive much Comfort, leading to that inward Peace which passeth all understanding, and that all disturbing sects and heresies . . . will be made to vanish and cease."[12]