Quakerism is founded upon the belief that the mystical encounter is central to religious life. We feel that God Speaks within the heart of every man in love, conscience and the revelation of truth, and will go on doing so as long as man exists to listen. From time to time, throughout history, He speaks with unusual force and clarity, revealing truth to a culture or to the entire world through prophets – devout and selfless men and women who prove their dedication to his purpose. Holy Scripture itself, we never forget, is the result of the mystical experience.
Within the Christian tradition, few purer, more dedicated instruments of divine revelation ever lived than the "little cobbler of Goerlitz." Jacob Boehme. This extraordinary man – mystic, visionary, illuminate, clairvoyant – was born in 1575, forty-nine years before the birth of George Fox, and died in 1624 only a few months after Fox came into the world. Boehme has sometimes been called the most illustrious forerunner of Quakerism; but, reflecting on his life, one is struck by something more. His religious convictions, his earnest piety his manner of expression, as well as his family background and boyhood, are so similar to those of the founder of the Society of Friends as to suggest a profound spiritual kinship. Were they linked, these men who never met in life, by some grand plan involving the revelation of truth and the converting of a people to follow it? The question teases the mind and returns again and again as one compares their thought, the forces that molded their characters, and their writing styles, of which the tone, the cadence, even the figures of speech are alike, if not identical.
