ives here that we cannot
possibly soar above the conflict between Good and Evil. It must be
observed that Boehme repudiated the doctrine that there is any
evolution of God in time. "I say not that Nature is God," he says:
"He Himself is all, and communicates His power to all His works." But
the creation of the archetypes was not a temporal act.

Like other Protestant mystics, he lays great stress on the indwelling
presence of Christ. And, consistently with this belief, he revolts
against the Calvinistic doctrine of imputed righteousness, very much
as did the Cambridge Platonists a little later. "That man is no
Christian," he says, "who doth merely comfort himself with the
suffering, death, and satisfaction of Christ, and doth impute it to
himself as a gift of favour, remaining himself still a wild beast and
unregenerate.... If this said sacrifice is to avail for me, it must be
wrought _in_ me. The Father must beget His Son in my desire of faith,
that my faith's hunger may apprehend Him in His word of promise. Then
I put Him on, in His entire process of justification, in my inward
ground; and straightway there begins in me the killing of the wrath of
the devil, death, and hell, from the inward power of Christ's death. I
am inwardly dead, and He is my life; I live in Him, and not in my
selfhood. I am an instrument of God, wherewith He doeth what He will."
To the same effect William Law says, "Christ given _for_ us is neither
more nor less than Christ given _into_ us. He is in no other sense our
full, perfect, and sufficient Atonement, than as His nature and spirit
are born and formed in us." Law also insists that the Atonement was
the effect, not of the wrath, but of the love of God. "Neither reason
nor scripture," he says, "will allow us to bring wrath into God
Himself, as a temper of His mind, who is only infinite, unalterable,
overflowing Love." "Wrath is atoned when sin is extinguished." This
revolt against the forensic theory of the Atonement is very
characteristic of Protestant Mysticism.[352]

The disparagement of external rites and ordinances, which we have
found in so many mystics, appears in William Law, though he was
himself precise in observing all the rules of the English Church.
"This pearl of eternity is the Church, a temple of God _within_ thee,
the consecrated place of Divine worship, where alone thou canst
worship God in spirit and in truth. In _spirit_, because thy spirit is
that alone in thee which c