You say, that your nature stands in a trembling desire after the birth of this light and love: if so, you stand in the very place of its birth, and must stand there till it is born in you. It can be born nowhere else, nor in any other manner; and all that Jacob Behmen has written, is only to direct and bring you to this place of its birth. He himself has given you all the hearsay knowledge that you can have of it; for he can give you no more from the plainest words. And therefore, to help anyone to work with his brain for clear notions, and rational conceptions, of what he has written, is helping him to do and be that, which all his works, from the beginning to the end, absolutely declare against, as contrary to the whole nature and end of them. Which speak, as he saith, with the sound of a trumpet; and chiefly to awaken man out of the dream and death of rational, notional, and hearsay knowledge; and to show him, that his own inward hunger and thirst after God, is that alone which can and must open the fountain of light and divine knowledge in him. |