Reflections on Esaias Stiefel's Booklet: On the Threefold State of Man and His New Birth

burns; thus a tincture also appears from it, and just as the spirit of man is in itself, so he also receives a heaven for a dwelling.

70. Outside of God, nothing can fall, for He Himself is everything. But He is not called God in everything, because of His wrath, which devours much. Did He not devour the entire royal host of Lucifer? They were angels, and yet they became devils. How would it then not be possible in a man who, after all, carries the mirror of sin in his outer flesh?

71. Yes, if the soul does not enter into the false desire, so that it does not desire sin, then it is not possible. The soul is free. It has the high fire-principle within itself, both for the dark world and for the light-world. What it awakens for itself, that it has. It may live in the love or wrath of God; where it turns itself, there it is accepted, as it is the mother of eternal nature. In all things, where the eternal will turns itself, according to that its image is also figured.

72. Therefore, man should not be secure or reckless in this world, but always humble himself before God and cast his will into the heart of God. All the time while he carries the outer hut, he hovers in danger. But while he remains with his will in God, he is in the hand of God, and no one may snatch a little sheep from the hands of Christ (Mark 10). Unless the soul's will snatches itself out: which happens when the soul is secure; then the devil sows his poisonous imagination into it, so that it begins to imagine toward falsity within.

73. You must understand that the soul stands in the quality of the Father, and the beautiful image, when it is born, stands in the quality of the Son. The soul has the center of the dark world, and the image has the center of the light-world, as the heart of God. But if it goes out from the love of God, then it leads its image into the quality of the Father, into the dark world.

74. Therefore, it is called upon us only to be humble before our God and not to desire to exalt our name, but the name of God within us. We are not the tree with the root, but little branches and boughs in the tree. We indeed receive the essence and power of the tree, just as the tree gives to the little branch