The end of the good man's life, however, was near. He was taken ill in November 1624, while staying with his old friend, von Schweinitz, and he hurried home to Görlitz, where his family had remained during his absence, to die in the quiet of his own house. The night before he died, he spoke of hearing beautiful music, and asked to have the door opened that he might hear it better. In the morning--as the _Aurora_ appeared--he bade farewell to his wife and children, committed his soul to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ, arranged a few simple matters, and, with a smile on his face, said, "Now I go to Paradise."
His old enemy, Richter, had died a few months before him, but the new pastor was of the same temper and refused to preach his funeral sermon. The second pastor of the city was finally ordered by the Governor of Lausitz to preach the sermon, which he began with the words, "I had rather have walked a hundred and twenty miles than preach this sermon!"[48] The common people, however,--the shoemakers, tanners and a "great concourse of us his fast friends," as one of them writes,--were at the funeral, and a band of young shoemakers carried his body to its last resting-place, where a block of porphyry now informs the visitor that "Jacob Boehme, _philosophus Teutonicus_" sleeps beneath.
Grützmacher holds that Boehme is an "isolated thinker," having little, if any, historical connection with { 169} the past.[49] I do not agree with this view. I find in him rather the ripe fulfilment of the powerful protest against the dead letter, against a formal religion, and equally a fulfilment of a Christianity of inward life, which was voiced so vigorously in the writings of Denck, Bünderlin, Entfelder, Franck, and Weigel, neglecting for the moment another side of Boehme and another set of influences which appeared in him. The central note of his life-long prophet-cry was against a form of religion built upon the letter of Scripture and consisting of external ceremonies and practices, and this is the ground of Richter's bitter hostility and stubborn opposition.[50]
The Church of his day seems to him a veritable Babel--"full of pride and wrangling, and jangling, and snarling about the letter of the written Word," lacking in true, real, effectual knowledge and power; a pitiably poor "substitute for the Temple of the holy Spirit where God's living Word is taught."[51] Through each of his books we hear of "verbal Christendom"; of "titular Christians"; of "historical feigned faith"; of "history religion"; of "an external forgiveness of sins"; of "the work of outward letters." "The builders of Babel," he says, "cannot endure that one should teach that Christ Himself must be the teacher in the human heart"--"they jangle instead about the mere husk, about the written word and letter while they miss the living Word."[52]