was born at Old Seidenberg, a village near Goerlitz in Silesia, in the
year 1575, and he died at Goerlitz in the year 1624. Jacob Behmen has no
biography. Jacob Behmen's books are his best biography. While working
with his hands, Jacob Behmen's whole life was spent in the deepest and
the most original thought; in piercing visions of GOD and of nature; in
prayer, in praise, and in love to GOD and man. Of Jacob Behmen it may be
said with the utmost truth and soberness that he lived and moved and had
his being in GOD. Jacob Behmen has no biography because his whole life
was hid with CHRIST in GOD.

* * * * *

While we have nothing that can properly be called a biography of Jacob
Behmen, we have ample amends made to us in those priceless morsels of
autobiography that lie scattered so plentifully up and down all his
books. And nothing could be more charming than just those incidental and
unstudied utterances of Behmen about himself. Into the very depths of a
passage of the profoundest speculation Behmen will all of a sudden throw
a few verses of the most childlike and heart-winning confidences about
his own mental history and his own spiritual experience. And thus it is
that, without at all intending it, Behmen has left behind him a complete
history of his great mind and his holy heart in those outbursts of
diffidence, deprecation, explanation, and self-defence, of which his
philosophical and theological, as well as his apologetic and
experimental, books are all so full. It were an immense service done to
our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all
Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of
the best of those autobiographic passages. Such a book, if it were well
done, would at once take rank with _The Confessions_ of ST. AUGUSTINE,
_The Divine Comedy_ of DANTE, and the _Grace Abounding_ of JOHN BUNYAN.