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

10. Therefore / even if I speak with you from my gifts / and show you the building in the interior: I ask you to understand it as nothing other than heartfelt and well-intentioned. I do not do it out of levity / or presumption / but in true knowledge given to me by GOD / for benefit and improvement / so that our little pearl might be found / and the enemy / who has held us captive for so long / might suffocate in his poison / so that we may learn to recognize the wondrous GOD in his unsearchable wisdom / and rejoice in Him as his children / just like a branch on a tree / in his essence and power / which joy is a greening in the essence of our life: Therefore, do not interpret it otherwise.

11. You have sent me a booklet / to examine it together with your friends / and you request my knowledge regarding it to be opened to you / which indeed might already be sufficiently opened and understood by you in my writings / which you have in your hands / as to what I would answer you thereon: But because it serves for the honor of GOD / and for human salvation / I will give you a short summary answer regarding it / and have referred you further to my writings.

12. Concerning the author of the same / who is indeed unknown to me according to my external man / but not strange in the spirit / but born from my mother's essence and power / I see / say / and recognize so much from his written words / which without doubt is also his spirit and entire will / that he has surely / as he also reports himself / completely surrendered himself again into the mother's womb / and desires nothing but only the mother's life and spirit.

13. And that surely only the mother's spirit in him as in the old one / and now however in a new greening essence / holds the old one captive in grim torment / and is thus sunken with the old essence / that he cannot know himself / in that he imagines he is whole and entirely / through and through new / and without sin and blemish: This is indeed well said / but only according to the inner new man born from Christ / but not according to the mortal corruptible man / which the new one holds captive within himself / as penetrating or completely overshadowing.

14. The old stock / or husk / is understood as the body / which Adam introduced to us with his imagination into earthliness / out of earthy and Devilish essence / as an adverse torment / It is not the one that is greening / but the faded image of GOD