eagerly circulated in MS. by Karl von Ender.
This raised him at once out of his homely sphere, and made him the
centre of a local circle of liberal thinkers, considerably above him in
station and culture. The charge of heresy was, however, soon directed
against him by Gregorius Richter, then pastor primarius of Gorlitz.
Feeling ran so high after Richter's pulpit denunciations, that, in July
1613, the municipal council, fearing a disturbance of the peace, made a
show of examining Boehme, took possession of his fragmentary quarto, and
dismissed the writer with an admonition to meddle no more with such
matters. For five years he obeyed this injunction. But in 1618 began a
second period of authorship; he poured forth, but did not publish,
treatise after treatise, expository and polemical, in the next and the
two following years. In 1622 he composed nothing but a few short pieces
on true repentance, resignation, &c., which, however, devotionally
speaking, are the most precious of all his writings. They were the only
pieces offered to the public in his lifetime and with his permission, a
fact which is evidence of the essentially religious and practical
character of his mind. Their publication at Gorlitz, on New Year's day
1624, under the title of _Der Weg zu Christo_, was the signal for
renewed clerical hostility. Boehme had by this time entered on the third
and most prolific though the shortest period (1623-1624) of his
speculation. His labours at the desk were interrupted in May 1624 by a
summons to Dresden, where his famous "colloquy" with the Upper
Consistorial court was made the occasion of a flattering but transient
ovation on the part of a new circle of admirers. Richter died in August
1624, and Boehme did not long survive his pertinacious foe. Seized with
a fever when away from home, he was with difficulty conveyed to Gorlitz.
His wife was at Dresden on business; and during the first week of his
malady he was nursed by a literary friend. He died, after receiving the
rites of the church, grudgingly administered by the authorities, on
Sunday, the 17th of November.

Boehme always professed that a direct inward opening or illumination was
the only source of his speculative power. He pretended to no other
revelation. Ecstatic raptures we should not expect, for he was
essentially a Protestant mystic. No "thus saith the Lord" was claimed as
his warrant, after the manner of Antoinette Bourignon, or Ludowick
Muggleton; no spi