patience, teachableness, hunger for truth, hunger for righteousness,--in
that measure you will find Jacob Behmen to be what MAURICE tells us he
found him to be, 'a generative thinker.' Out of much you cannot
understand,--wherever the blame for that may lie,--out of much slag and
much dross, I am mistaken if you will not lay up some of your finest
gold; and out of much straw and chaff some of the finest of the wheat.
The Divine Nature, human nature, time, space, matter, life, love, sin,
death, holiness, heaven, hell,--Behmen's reader must have lived and moved
all his days among such things as these: he must be at home, as far as
the mind of man can be at home, among such things as these, and then he
will begin to understand Behmen, and will still strive better and better
to understand him; and, where he does not as yet understand him, he will
set that down to his own inattention, incapacity, want of due
preparation, and want of the proper ripeness for such a study.

At the same time let all intending students of Jacob Behmen take warning
that they will have to learn an absolutely new and an unheard-of language
if they would speak with Behmen and have Behmen speak with them. For
Behmen's books are written neither in German nor in English of any age or
idiom, but in the most original and uncouth Behmenese. Like John Bunyan,
but never with John Bunyan's literary grace, Behmen will borrow, now a
Latin word or phrase from his reading of learned authors, or, more often,
from the conversations of his learned friends; and then he will take some
astrological or alchemical expression of AGRIPPA, or PARACELSUS, or some
such outlaw, and will, as with his awl and rosin-end, sew together a
sentence, and hammer together a page of the most incongruous and unheard-
of phraseology, till, as we read Behmen's earlier work especially, we
continually exclaim, O for a chapter of John Bunyan's clear, and sweet,
and classical English! The _Aurora_ was written in a language, if
writing and a language it can be called, that had never been seen written