As we have seen, Boehme does not in the least blink the tragic depth of sin, while he goes as far as anybody in holding that "the centre of man's soul came out of eternity,"[4] that "as a mother bringeth forth a child out of her own substance and nourisheth it therewith, so doth God with man his child,"[5] and that the inward ground and centre of the soul, with its divine capacity of response to Grace and Light, is an inalienable possession of every man.[6] Yet, at the same time, he insists that there is in every soul "both a yes and a no," a vision of the good and a _contrarium_, a hunger for the universal will of God and a hunger for the particular will of self.[7] The form of hunger, the inclination of desire, the attitude of will shapes the destiny, forms the fundamental disposition, and builds the life of every man into heaven or into hell--"a man puts on a garment of light or a garment of wrath as he puts on clothes."[8] To consent to false desire, to turn toward objects that feed only the particular selfish will, to live in the lower "qualities" of dark-fire is to { 192} form a soul _tinctured_ with darkness and sundered from the eternal root of Life. Lucifer went the whole way in his consent to false and evil desire. He said, "Evil be thou my good!" and formed his entire nature out of the dark-principle, and "his Light went out." Adam and his offspring after him, however, only dimmed the native Light and deadened the original power that belongs to one who comes from God, to live in heavenly harmony and joy. Man has fallen indeed, but he is not hopelessly lost, he is "forever seeking his native country," and he forever bears within himself an immortal seed which may burst into Life--into a "Lily-blossom."[9] The way of salvation for Boehme is the _process_ by which this original Light and power, dimmed and deadened by sin, are restored to the soul.
He never tires of insisting that the restoration can come only by a _process of Life_, not by a "scheme" of theology. Like the early prophets of Israel, in their sweeping attacks on the ritual and sacrificial systems that were being substituted for moral and spiritual life, Boehme flings himself with holy passion against the substitution of doctrines of salvation for a real life-process of salvation, personally experienced in the soul. "Cain" and "Babel" are his two favourite types of the prevailing substitute-religion which he calls "verbal," or "historical," or "titular" Christianity.[10] "Whatever Babel teaches," he says, "of external imputed righteousness, or of external assumed adoption is without foundation or footing."[11] He is still only a follower of "Cain" who tries to cover his old, evil, unchanged self "with the purple mantle of Christ's death."[12] The "opinion" that the old man of evil-will can be "covered" with Christ's merit, the "faith" that His death pays off for us the debt of our sin is only "a supposed religion."[13] "Christianity," he says again, "does not consist in the mere knowing of history and applying the history-knowledge to ourselves, { 193} saying: 'Christ died for us; He hath paid the ransom for us, so that we need do nothing but comfort ourselves therewith and steadfastly believe that it is so.'"[14] The "doctors" and "the wise world" and "the makers of opinion" will have it that Christ has suffered on the Cross for all our sins, and that we can be justified and acquitted of all our transgressions by what He did for us, but it is no true, safe way for the soul. To stake faith upon a history that once was, to look for "satisfaction" through the sufferings which Christ endured before we were born is to be "the child of an assumed grace," is to possess a mere external and historical faith that leaves the dim, weak soul where it was before. All such "invented works" and "supposed schemes" are of Anti-Christ, they "avail nothing" whatever toward the real process of salvation.[15]