water ink, yet all would not sufficiently declare the evil that sin hath
done. For sin has made this house of heavenly light to be a den of
darkness; this house of joy to be a house of mourning, lamentation, and
woe; this house of all refreshment to be full of hunger and thirst; this
abode of love to be a prison of enmity and ill-will; this seat of
meekness to be the haunt of pride and rage and malice. For laughter sin
has brought horror; for munificence, beggary; and for heaven, hell. Oh,
thou miserable man, turn convert. For the Father stretches out both His
hands to thee. Do but turn to Him and He will receive and embrace thee
in His love.' It was the sin and misery of this world that first made
Jacob Behmen a philosopher, and it was the sinfulness of his own heart
that at last made him a saint. Behmen's full doctrine and practice of
prayer also; his fine and fruitful treatment of what he always calls 'the
process of CHRIST'; and, intimately connected with that, his still super-
confessional treatment of imputation,--of all that, and much more like
that, I cannot now attempt to speak. Nor yet of his superb teaching on
love. 'Throw out thy heart upon all men,' he now commands and now
beseeches us. 'Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost
exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the
world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy contempt, thy envy, thy distaste,
thy dislike will still have dominion over thee. The Divine Nature will
be quenched and extinguished in thee, till nothing but self and hell is
left to thee. In the name, and in the strength of GOD, love all men.
Love thy neighbour as thyself, and do to thy neighbour as thou doest to
thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time; and now is the
day of salvation!'

Jacob Behmen died in his fiftieth year. He was libelled and maligned,
harassed and hunted to death by a world that was not worthy of such a
gift of GOD. A sudden and severe sickness came upon Behmen till he sank