By middle life Law was well known as a most able and brilliant writer on most of the burning theological questions of the day, as well as the author of one of the best loved and most widely read practical and ethical treatises in the language, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.  These earlier writings are by far the best known of his works, and it is with the Serious Call that his name will always be associated.

Until middle age he showed no marked mystical tendency, although we know that from the time he was an undergraduate he was a “diligent reader” of mystical books, and that he had studied, among others, Dionysius the Areopagite, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Suso, and the seventeenth century Quietists, Fenelon, Madame Guyon, and Antoinette Bourignon.

When, however, he was about forty-six (c. 1733), he came across the writings of the seer who set his whole nature aglow with spiritual fervour, so that when he first read his works they put him into “a perfect sweat.”  Jacob Boehme—­or Behmen, as he has usually been called in England—­(1575-1624), the illiterate and untrained peasant shoemaker of Goerlitz, is one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of mysticism, a history which does not lack wonders.  His work has so much influenced later mystical thought and philosophy that a little space must be devoted to him here.  He lived outwardly the quiet, hard-working life of a simple German peasant, but inwardly—­like his fellow-seer Blake—­he lived in a glory of illumination, which by flashes revealed to him the mysteries and splendours he tries in broken and faltering words to record.  He saw with the eye of his mind into the heart of things, and he wrote down as much of it as he could express.

The older mystics—­eastern and western alike—­had laid stress on unity as seen in the nature of God and all things.  No one more fully believed in ultimate unity than did Boehme, but he lays peculiar stress on the duality, or more accurately, the trinity in unity; and the central point of his philosophy is the fundamental postulate that all manifestation necessitates opposition.  He asserted the uniformity of law throughout all existence, physical and spiritual, and this law, which applies all through nature, divine and human alike, is that nothing can reveal itself without resistance, good can only be known through evil, and weakness through strength, just as light is only visible when reflected by a dark body.

Thus when God, the Triune Principle, or Will under three aspects, desires to become manifest, He divides the Will into two, the “yes” and the “no,” and so founds an eternal contrast to Himself out of His own hidden Nature, in order to enter into struggle with it, and finally to discipline and assimilate it.  The object of all manifested nature is the transforming of the will which says “No” into the will which says “Yes,” and this is brought about by seven organising spirits