ud came over me, a temptation beset me; and I sat still. It was
said, _All things come by Nature_; and the elements and stars came
over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded by it. And as I sat
still under it and let it alone, a living hope and a true voice arose
in me, which said, _There is a living God who made all things_.
Immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over
it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living God."]

[Footnote 356: So we may fairly say, if we remember that we are
speaking of what transcends time. Neither Boehme nor Law looks forward
to a golden age on this earth.]

[Footnote 357: Henry More's judgment is as follows: "Jacob Behmen, I
conceive, is to be reckoned in the number of those whose imaginative
faculty has the pre-eminence above the rational; and though he was a
good and holy man, his natural complexion, notwithstanding, was not
destroyed, but retained its property still; and, therefore, his
imagination being very busy about Divine things, he could not without
a miracle fail of becoming an enthusiast, and of receiving Divine
truths upon the account of the strength and vigour of his fancy;
which, being so well qualified with holiness and sanctity, proved not
unsuccessful in sundry apprehensions, but in others it fared with him
after the manner of men, the sagacity of his imagination failing him,
as well as the anxiety of reason does others of like integrity with
himself."]

[Footnote 358: Canon G.G. Perry, in his _Students' English Church
History_, disposes of this noble group of men in one contemptuous
paragraph, as a "class of divines who were neither Puritans nor High
Churchmen," and makes the astounding statement that "to the school
thus commenced, the deadness, carelessness, and indifference prevalent
in the eighteenth century are in large measure to be attributed." It
is of these very same men that Bishop Burnet writes, that if they had
not appeared to combat the "laziness and negligence," the "ease and
sloth" of the Restoration clergy, "the Church had quite lost her
esteem over the nation." Alexander Knox (_Works_, vol. iii. p. 199)
speaks of the rise of this school as a great instance of the design
of Providence to supply to the Church what had never before been
produced, writers who do "full honour at once to the elevation and the
rationality of Christian piety.... In their writings we are invited to
ascend, by having a prospect opened before