(5) God created the soul after the image of His highest perfection. He issued forth from the treasure-house of the everlasting Fatherhood in which He had rested from all eternity. Then the Son opened the tent of His everlasting glory and came forth from His high place to fetch His Bride, whom the Father had espoused to Him from all Eternity, back to that heaven from which she came. Therefore He came forth rejoicing as a bridegroom and suffered the pangs of love. Then He returned to His secret chamber in the silence and stillness of the everlasting Fatherhood. As He came forth from the Highest, so He returned to the Highest with His Bride, and revealed to her the hidden treasures of His Godhead.

(2) I affirm that had the Virgin not first borne God spiritually He would never have been born from her in bodily fashion. A certain woman said to Christ, "Blessed is the womb that bear Thee." To which Christ answered, "Nay, rather blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it." It is more worthy of God that He be born spiritually of every pure and virgin soul, than that He be born of Mary.

Hereby we should understand that humanity is, so to speak, the Son of God born from all eternity. The Father produced all creatures, and me among them, and I issued forth from Him with all creatures, and yet I abide in the Father. Just as the word which I now speak is conceived and spoken forth by me, and you all receive it, yet none the less it abides in me. Thus I and all creatures abide in the Father.

(41) And out of this heart JESUS CHRIST, the Son of God, in the womb or body of the Virgin Mary, went into all the three births or genitures, and assumed them really, that he might, through and with his innermost birth or geniture, take the devil, death and hell captive in the outermost birth, and overcome the wrath of God, as a king and victorious prince; and, in the power of his geniture or birth in the flesh, press through all men.

(1) THE true heaven, which is our own proper human heaven, into which the soul goeth when it parteth from the body, and into which Christ our King is entered, and from whence it was that he came from his Father, and was born, and became man in the body or womb of the Virgin Mary, has hitherto been close hidden from the children of men, and they have had many opinions about it.