he is thus a microcosm and, moreover, an image of God, all his knowledge
becomes self-knowledge, both sensuous perception (which is not caused by
the object, but only occasioned by it), and the knowledge of God. The
literalist knows not God, but he alone who bears God in himself. Man
is favored above other beings with the freedom to dwell in himself or
in God. When man came out from God, he was his own tempter and made himself
proud and selfish. Thus evil, which had before remained hidden, was
revealed, and became sin. As the separation from God is an eternal act, so
also redemption and resurrection form an inner event. Christ is born in
everyone who gives up the I-ness (_Ichheit_); each regenerate man is a son
of God. But no vicarious suffering can save him who does not put off the
old Adam, no matter how much an atheology sunk in literalism may comfort
itself with the hope that man can "drink at another's cost" (that the merit
of another is imputed to him).[1]

[Footnote 1: Weigel is discussed by J.O. Opel, Leipsic, 1864.]

German mysticism reaches its culmination in the Görlitz cobbler, Jacob
Böhme (1575-1624; _Aurora, or the Rising Dawn_; _Mysterium Magnum, or
on the First Book of Moses_, etc. The works of Böhme, collected by his
apostle, Gichtel, appeared in 1682 in ten volumes, and in 1730 in six
volumes; a new edition was prepared by Schiebler in 1831-47, with a second
edition in 1861 _seq_.). Böhme's doctrine[1] centers about the problem of
the origin of evil. He transfers this to God himself and joins therewith
the leading thought of Eckhart, that God goes through a process, that he
proceeds from an unrevealed to a revealed condition. At the sight of a tin
vessel glistening in the sun, he conceived, as by inspiration, the idea
that as the sunlight reveals itself on the dark vessel so all light needs
darkness and all good evil in order to appear and to become knowable.
Everything becomes perceptible through its opposite alone: gentleness