There had appeared a year earlier (1644) a seven-page biography of Boehme which was the first presentation of him to the English reader. This brief sketch contains the well-known incidents which became the stock material for the later accounts of his life.[1] It also contained the following quaint description of Boehme which was the model for all the portraits of the Teutonic philosopher in the English biographies of him: "The stature of his outward body was almost of no Personage; his person was little and leane, with browes somewhat inbowed; high Temples, somewhat hauk-nosed: His eyes were gray and somewhat heaven blew, and otherwise as the Windows in Solomon's Temple: He had a thin Beard; a small low Voyce. His Speech was lovely. He was modest in his Behaviour, humble in his conversation and meeke in his heart. His spirit was highly enlightened by God, as is to be seen and discerned in the Divine Light out of his writings."
The slender volume of Theosophical Epistles was followed by another little book issued a year later (1646), {209} consisting of a Discourse delivered in Latin in the Schools at Cambridge by Charles Hotham, Rector of Wigan. This Discourse was translated into English by the author's brother, Justice Durant Hotham, and was published under the title: Introduction to Teutonic Philosophy, or A Determination concerning the Original of the Soul, Englished by D. F. [Durant Frater], 1650. This interesting little volume, full of quaint phrase and strange speculation, reflects throughout its pages the profound influence of Boehme on these two brothers. The Preface to the Englished edition written by Justice Hotham not only shows specific marks of Boehme's influence upon a high-minded and scholarly man, but it also reveals in an impressive way a type of thought that was very prevalent in England at this period of commotion. "There are," Justice Hotham says, "two islands of exceeding danger, yet built upon and inhabited and defended as part of the main continent of Truth. The first is called: 'I believe as the Church believeth.' Happy man whom so easie labour hath set on the shore of wisdom! The other island is called: 'whatsoever the Church believes that will I not believe.'" Both these "islands" seem to him "exceeding dangerous." To adopt as truth what the Church has believed, solely because the Church has believed it, to forego the personal quest and to arrive at "the shores of wisdom" without the venturous voyage, is "too easie labour" for the soul. But, nevertheless, he feels that the opposite danger—the danger of negating a truth merely because the Church affirms it—is even more serious. It is wise to maintain an attitude of "much reverence" toward the "unanimous consent of good and pious men in sacred matters." He suggests that the way of wisdom consists in making the "I believe" of the Church "neither a fetter nor a scandel." "May I be," he says, "in the bed-route of those Seekers that, distrusting the known and experienced deceits of their own Reason, walk unfettered in the quest of truth, . . . not hunting those poor soules with Dogge and speare whose dimme sight hath led them into desert and unbeated {210} paths." This was in all probability the Justice Hotham of whom George Fox wrote: "He was a pretty tender man yt had had some experiences of God's workeinge in his hearte: & after yt I had some discourse with him off ye things of God hee tooke mee Into his Closett & saide hee had knowne yt principle [of the Light] this 10 yeere: & hee was glad yt ye Lorde did now publish it abroade to ye people."[2]
Like his Teutonic master, Justice Hotham distrusts Reason and Sense as spiritual guides. They are at best, he says, "but guides of the night, dim lights set up, far distant from Truth's stately mansion, to lead poor groping souls in this world's affairs." The surer Guide is within the soul itself, for the soul of man, he insists, has "a noble descent from eternal essences" and "our nobel Genealogy should mind us of our Father's House and make us weary of tutelage under hairy Faunes and cloven-footed Satyres."[3] He shows that he has lost all interest in theological speculations that assume a God remote in time and space, a God who once created a world and left it to go to ruin. He reminds his readers that the God in whom he believes is "yet alive and still speaks."[4] In the light of this Preface, in which he declares that he has "suckt in truth from divinest philosophy" from his childhood, it is not strange that he welcomed Fox, when the latter appeared in Yorkshire in 1651, proclaiming an inward Light and a present God near at hand, nor is it surprising that Hotham said to the young prophet of the inward Guide: "If God had not raised uppe this principle of light and life, ye nation had beene overspread with rantism . . . but this principle of truth overthrew ye roote & grounde of there [i.e. the Ranters'] principle."[5]
The enthusiasm of Justice Hotham for his Teutonic master gets fervid expression at the end of his Preface as follows: "Whatever the thrice great Hermes [Hermes Trismegistus] delivered as oracles from his prophetical tripos, or Pythagoras spake by authority or {211} Socrates debated or Aristotle affirmed; yea, whatever divine Plato prophesied or Plotinus proved: this and all this, or a far higher and profounder philosophy is (I think) contained in the Teutonick's writings. And if there be any friendly medium which can possibly reconcile these ancient differences between the nobler wisdom which hath fixt her Palace in Holy Writ and her stubborn handmaid, Naturall Reason: this happy marriage of the Spirit and Soul, this wonderful consent of discords in one harmony, we owe in great measure to Teutonicus his skill!"
The central problem of the Discourse, written by the brother, Charles Hotham, is the origin of the soul. After the manner of his German teacher, the English disciple finds the origin of man's soul in "the bottomless, immeasurable Abyss of the Godhead," in "the great deep of the perpetually eternal God." Man is an epitome of the universe. He unites in himself all the contrary principles of the worlds visible and invisible, he is a unity of body and soul, a centre of light and darkness, and in him is a "supreme region," or "Divine Principle," "by the mediation of which man has direct fellowship with God." In man, who thus epitomizes all the spheres and principles of the universe, "God, as in a glasse, hath a lively and delightful prospect of His own lovely visage and incomprehensible Beauty." Finally, again, the disciple reflects the constant teaching of Boehme that everything in the visible world is a symbol of a fundamental and eternal World.
Durant Hotham showed the full measure of his devotion to his German master in the Life of Jacob Behmen which he wrote in 1653.[6] It is, however, much more important for the insight which it gives of the inner life of the Yorkshire Justice than for any biographical information it furnishes of Boehme himself. Hotham thinks that in Boehme he has discovered a new type of Christian Saint—"one who led a saint-like life in much sweet communion {212} with God," while he declares that many of those who "get admission into the Calendar by the synodical jurisdiction of those who claim also to hold the bunch of keys to the bigger Heaven" are hardly ripe for canonization—"As for many who in these last ages have termed themselves saints—what shift God may make of them in heaven, I know not (He can do much)—but if I may speak unfeignedly, they are so unmortified and untrue of word and deed that they are found untoward members for a true Commonwealth and civil Society here on Earth."[7]
The type of saint the Justice admires is one who refuses utterly to choose the path of least resistance, one who will not be "a messenger of eternal happiness at a cheap rate," but rather one who comes to challenge the easy world, to fight evil customs and entrenched systems and to win "the Land which the Devil holds in possession"; and, with the name of Jacob Boehme, he thinks he can "begin a new roll of Civil Saints," hoping, he says, that in these last generations "much company" may be added to the bead roll thus happily started.
Two points stand out clearly as central ideas of Justice Hotham's Christianity. The first one is that religion is an inward affair. "God," he declares, "hath sent this last Generation a plain, uncouth Message, bidding man to fight, telling him that he shall have a Heaven, a Joy, a Paradise, a Land, a Territory, a Kingship—but that all this is in himself, the Land to be won is himself."[8] The second one is that religion is a progressive movement, an unfolding revelation of life. "What a height of Presumption is it," he says, "to believe that the Wisdom and fullness of God can ever be pent up in a Synodical Canon? How overweening are we to limit the successive manifestations of God to a present rule and light, persecuting all that comes not forth in its height and breadth!" It is through this "unnatural desire" to keep Christians in "a perpetual infancy" that "our dry nurses" in the Church have "brought us to such a dwarfish stature," {213} and he prays that the merciful God may teach at least one nation a better way than that of "muzzling" the bringer of fresh light.
Much more important, however, for the dissemination of Boehme's ideas in England was the patient and faithful work of John Sparrow who, in collaboration with his kinsman, John Ellistone, translated into English the entire body of Boehme's writings, between the years 1647 and 1661.[9] Sparrow was born at Stambourne in Essex in 1615. He was admitted to the Inner Court in 1633 and subsequently called to the Bar. He was probably the author of a widely-read book, published in 1649, under the title of Mercurius Teutonicus, consisting of a series of "propheticall passages" from Boehme.[10] His outer life was uneventful; his inner life is revealed in his Introductions to the Boehme Translations. He begins his long series of Translations with the testimony that the writings of this author have "so very much satisfied" his own soul that he wants others to be partakers of the same source of light, though he warns his readers that their own souls must come by experience into the condition Boehme himself was in before they can fully understand him.[11] He is profoundly impressed, {214} as his great contemporary, Milton, was, with the strange birth of new sects "now sprung up in England," but he hopes that "goodness will get the upper hand and that the fruits of the spirit will prevail," and his mind "is led to think" that through Boehme's message, which has been very beneficial in other nations, "our troubled, doubting souls in England may receive much Comfort, leading to that inward Peace which passeth all understanding, and that all disturbing sects and heresies . . . will be made to vanish and cease."[12]
Sparrow was deeply impressed with two of Boehme's central ideas, and he gives expression to them, in his own quaint and peculiar way, in almost every one of his Introductions—(1) the idea that the visible is a parable of the Invisible, and (2) the idea that God manifests Himself within men. In the very first of the Introductions both of these ideas appear: "This outward world," he says, "is the best outward looking-glasse to see whatever hath been, is, or shall be in Eternity, and our own minds are the best inward looking-glasse to see Eternity exactly in";[13] and he expresses the belief that any one who learns to read all the work of God in the world without, and in the mind of man within, will learn to know Him truly, will see Eternity manifested in time, will discover that the mind of man is a centre of all mysteries, and that heaven and hell are potentially in us, and he will be convinced that God is in all things and all things are in God; that we live in Him and that He lives in us.[14]