understanding and the imagination. This nobly evangelical book is made
up of four tracts, entitled respectively, _Of True Repentance_, _Of True
Resignation_, _Of Regeneration_, and _Of the Supersensual Life_. And a
deep vein of autobiographic life and interest runs through the four
tracts and binds them into a quick unity. 'A soldier,' says Behmen, 'who
has been in the wars can best tell another soldier how to fight.' And
neither Augustine nor Luther nor Bunyan carries deeper wounds, or broader
scars, nor tells a nobler story in any of their autobiographic and
soldierly books than Behmen does in his _Way to Christ_. At the
commencement of _The True Repentance_ he promises us that he will write
of a process or way on which he himself has gone. 'The author herewith
giveth thee the best jewel that he hath.' And a true jewel it is, as the
present speaker will testify. If _The True Repentance_ has a fault at
all it is the fault of Rutherford's _Letters_. For the taste of some of
his readers Behmen, like Rutherford, draws rather too much on the
language and the figures of the married life in setting forth the love of
CHRIST to the espoused soul, and the love of the espoused soul to CHRIST.
But with that, and all its other drawbacks, _The True Repentance_ is such
a treatise that, once discovered by the proper reader, it will be the
happy discoverer's constant companion all his earthly and penitential
days. As the English reader is carried on through the fourth tract, _The
Supersensual Life_, he experiences a new and an increasing sense of ease
and pleasure, combined with a mystic height and depth and inwardness all
but new to him even in Behmen's books. The new height and depth and
inwardness are all Jacob Behmen's own; but the freedom and the ease and
the movement and the melody are all William Law's. In his preparations
for a new edition of Behmen in English, William Law had re-translated and
paraphrased _The Supersensual Life_, and the editor of the 1781 edition
of Behmen's works has incorporated Law's beautiful rendering of that
tract in room of JOHN SPARROW'S excellent but rather too antique