ul, what the soul is,
and how it is an eternal creature. Also what heaven is, wherein GOD and
the holy angels and holy men dwell, and hell wherein the devils dwell:
and how all things were originally created and had their being. In sum,
what the Essence of all Essences is. And thus I commit my reader to the
sweet love of GOD.' _The Three Principles_, according to CHRISTOPHER
WALTON, was the first book of Behmen's that William Law ever held in his
hand. That, then, was the title-page, and those were the contents, that
threw that princely and saintly mind into such a sweat. It was a great
day for William Law, and through him it was, and will yet be acknowledged
to have been, a great day for English theology when he chanced, at an old
bookstall, upon _The Three Principles_, Englished by a Barrister of the
Inner Temple. The picture of that bookstall that day is engraven in
lines of light and love on the heart of every grateful reader of Jacob
Behmen and of William Law's later and richer and riper writings.

In three months after he had finished _The Three Principles_, Behmen had
composed a companion treatise, entitled _The Threefold Life of Man_.
Modest about himself as Behmen always was, he could not be wholly blind
about his own incomparable books. And he but spoke the simple truth
about his third book when he said of it--as, indeed, he was constantly
saying about all his books--that it will serve every reader just
according to his constellation, his inclination, his disposition, his
complexion, his profession, and his whole condition. 'You will be soon
weary of all contentious books,' he wrote to CASPER LINDERN, 'if you
entertain and get _The Threefold Life of Man_ into your mind and heart.'
'The subject of regeneration,' says Christopher Walton, 'is the pith and
drift of all Behmen's writings, and the student may here be directed to
begin his course of study by mastering the first eight chapters of _The
Threefold Life_, which appear to have been in great favour with Mr. Law.'

Behmen's next book was a very extraordinary piece of work, and it had a
very extraordinary origin. A certain BALTHAZAR WALTER, who seems to have
been a second Paracelsus in his love of knowledge and in his lifelong
pursuit of knowledge, had, like Paracelsus, travelled east, and west, and
north, and south in search of that ancient and occult wisdom of which so
many men in that day dreamed. But Walter, like his predecessor
Paracelsus, had