and will help thee, and thy soul shall be the whole of heaven within
thee. It is a fundamental doctrine of Behmen's that the fall would have
been immediate and eternal death to Adam and Eve had not the Divine Word,
the Seed of the woman, entered their hearts, and kept a footing in their
hearts, and in the hearts of all their children, against the fulness of
time when He would take our flesh and work out our redemption. And thus
it is that Behmen appeals to all his readers, that if they will only go
down deep enough into their own hearts--then, there, down there, deeper
than indwelling sin, deeper than original sin, deep down and seated in
the very substance and centre of their souls--they will come upon secret
and unexpected seeds of the Divine Life. Seeds, blades, buddings, and
new beginnings of the very life of GOD the Son, in their deepest souls.
Secret and small, Behmen exclaims, as those seeds of Eden are, despise
them not; destroy them not, for a blessing for thee is in them. Water
those secret seeds, sun them, dig about them, and they will grow up in
you also. The Divine Life is in you, quench it not, for it is of GOD.
Nay, it is GOD Himself in you. It depends upon yourself whether or no
that which is at this moment the smallest of all seeds is yet to become
in you the greatest and the most fruitful of all trees.

'Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,' is a characteristic saying
of a fellow-countryman of Behmen's. And Behmen's super-confessional and
almost super-scriptural treatment of that frequent scriptural
anthropomorphism,--'unavoidable and yet intolerable,'--the wrath of GOD,
must be left by me in Behmen's own bold pages. Strong meat belongeth to
them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their
senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Behmen's philosophical,
theological, and experimental doctrine of sin also, with one example,
must be wholly passed by. 'If all trees were clerks,' he exclaims in one
place, 'and all their branches pens, and all the hills books, and all the