ourselves and life in God-these are convictions with him so deep and blessed-so far beyond all Greek philosophy—so fatal to the intellectual arrogance of pantheism, that they bear him safe through every peril. GOWER. His sermons cannot fail to do one good—read with the heart and imagination. But if you coldly criticise, and can make no allowance for the allegories and metaphors and vehement language of the mystic, you may shut the book at once. ATHERTON. And shut out blessing from your soul. It is not difficult to see, however, where Tauler's danger lies. There is an excess of negation in his divinity. He will ignore, deny, annihilate almost everything you can name,-bid you be knowledgeless, desireless, motionless,-will enjoin submission to the unknown God (when it is our triumph in Christ that we submit to the Revealed and Known)—and, in short, leaves scarcely anything positive save the mysterious lapse of the soul's Ground, or Spark, into the Perfect, the Essential One. He seems sometimes to make our very personality a sin, as though the limitations of our finite being were an element in our guilt. The separation of a particular faculty or higher power of the soul which unites with God, while the inferior powers are either absorbed or occupied in the lower sphere, this is the great metaphysical mistake which lies at the root of so many forms of mysticism. With Tauler the work of grace consists too much of extremes-it dehumanizes in order to deify. WILLOUGHBY. But that, remember, is no fault of Tauler's especially. He does but follow here the ascetic, superhuman aspiration of a Church which, trying to raise some above humanity, sinks myriads below it. ATHERTON. Granted. That error does not lessen my love and admiration for the man. GOWER. Your extracts show, too, that the Nothingness! towards which he calls men to strive is no indolent Quietism, c. 5.] Tauler's Doctrine-its Excellence. 253 nor, as with Eckart, a kind of metaphysical postulate, but in fact a profound spiritual self-abasement and the daily working out of a self-sacrificing Christ-like character. ATHERTON. Blessed are his contradictions and inconsistencies! Logic cannot always reconcile Tauler with himself— our hearts do.1o WILLOUGHBY. Never surely was a theory so negative combined with an action more fervently intense-a positiveness more benign. GOWER. In his life we understand him,—that is at once the explanation and vindication of what his mysticism means. ATHERTON. Few, however, of his fellow-mystics rose, so far as Tauler, above the peculiar dangers of mysticism. Even the good layman, Nicholas of Basle, was a man of vision, and assumed a kind of prophecy. Tauler and the Theologia Germanica stand almost alone in rejecting the sensuous element of mysticism-its apparitions, its voices, its celestial phantasmagoria. With many of his friends mysticism became secluded, effeminate, visionary, because uncorrected, as in his case, by benevolent action, by devoted conflict against priestly wrong. KATE. Tauler, then, was a Protestant in spirit—a genuine forerunner of the Reformation? ATHERTON. Unquestionably. MRS. ATHERTON. But what could the common people make of this high ideal he sets before them? Could they be brought heartily to care about that kind of ultra-human perfectness? Beautiful it must have been to hear this eloquent man describe the divine passion of the soul, how— Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might, —but bewildering, rather? 10 See Note, p. 257. ATHERTON. I am afraid so. evidently did understand and relish. Yet there was much they GOWER. In fact the Reformers were wanted, with their Bible, with their simpler, homelier teaching-so much less ascetic, so much more human-and with their written word, interpreted more soundly; coming, not to extinguish that inner light, but to enclose, as in a glass, the precious flame, otherwise fitfully blown about by the gusts of circumstance and feeling. WILLOUGHBY. But none the less let us praise the man who lived so nobly by the light he had-who made human works as nothing, that God might be all-who took the heavenly kingdom from the hands of the priest, and proclaimed it in the heart of every spiritual worshipper. GOWER. Though Tauler adopts at times the language of Eckart, no one can fail to discern a very different spirit. How much more profound his apprehension of sin-his sense of need; how much more prominent Christ, rescuing and purifying the stricken soul. Tauler lays man in the dust, and keeps him there. Eckart suffers him to expand from Nothing to Infinity. Summarily, I would put the difference thus :-With Eckart the language of Christianity becomes the metaphorical expression for pantheism; with Tauler, phraseology approaching pantheism is the metaphorical expression of a most truly Christian conviction. If the former sins even more in the spirit than in the letter, in the case of the latter the sins of the letter are redeemed by the excellence of the spirit. NOTE TO PAGE 246. The passages in the text are from the second Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Predigten, ii. pp. 353, &c. The spiritual conflict and desolation which had shaken Tauler's nature to its depths bears fruit in this profound humility. Selfabasement is the cardinal doctrine of all his sermons; his lowliness of spirit the safeguard of his theology from all dangerous error. The troubles through which he and Suso were made to pass, gave them an antidote to the poison of the current ecclesiastical doctrine. Consciences so stirred were not to be cast into c. 5.] German Mysticism in the 14th Century. 255 a sleep by the mesmeric passes of a priestly hand. He only who had hurt could heal; they fled from man to God-from means to the End, and so, like the patriarch, their eye saw God, and they repented and abhorred themselves as in dust and ashes, Never after that could they believe in salvation by works, and so they became aliens from the spirit of that Church whose pale retained them to the last. Tauler and his brethren will 'escape distinction;'-not that which is between creature and Creator, or between good and evil-that rather which the Pharisee makes when he says, 'I am holier than thou.' It is their very anxiety to escape all assumption of merit which partly vitiates the letter of their theology, and makes them speak as though grace substituted God for man within the renewed nature. They will escape the dry and fruitless distinctions of the schoolman. They will escape the distinction which selfish comfort-worshippers make so broad between ease and hardship. Sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure, are trustfully accepted as alike coming from the hand of love. Even when Tauler speaks of self-surrender to an 'unknown Will,' we must not press his words too far. It is very evident that he who reaches this coveted abandonment is not supposed to have forgotten that gracious character under which God has made Himself known-of which Christ is the manifestation. In casting his care on an unknown Will, Tauler acts on the conviction that he is cared for, this fact he knows; but precisely what that care may deem best for him he does not know. He surrenders, in true self-distrust, his personal notion of what may be the Divine good pleasure in any particular case. Few lessons were more needed than this in Tauler's day, when superstition found signs and wonders everywhere, and fanaticism so recklessly identified human wrath and Divine righteousness. Tauler's 'state above grace,' and 'transformed condition of the soul, in which God worketh all its works,' are perhaps little more than injudicious expressions for that more spontaneous and habitual piety characteristic of the established Christian life, that religion which consists so much more in a pervading spirit of devotion than in professed and special religious acts. He certainly inculcates no proud and self-complacent rejection and depreciation of any means. Rather would the man who learnt Tauler's doctrine well find all persons, objects, and circumstances, made more or less 'means of grace' to him. In a landscape or a fever, an enemy or an accident, his soul would find discipline and blessing. and not in mass and penance and paternoster merely ;-for is not God in all things near us, and willing to make everything minister to our spiritual growth? Such teaching was truly reformatory, antagonistic as it was to that excessive value almost everywhere attached in those days to works and sacraments. So again with Tauler's exhortation to rise above symbol, image, or figure. He carries it too far, indeed. Such asceticism of the soul is too severe a strain for ordinary humanity. It is unknown to His teaching, who spake as never man spake. Yet there lay in it a most wholesome protest against religious sentimentalism, visionary extravagance, hysterical inoperative emotions,-against the fanciful prettinesses of superstitious ritual and routine. Tauler's Nothing,' or 'Ground' of the soul, may be metaphysically a fiction-religiously it indicates the sole seat of inward peace. Only as we put no trust in things earthly,-only as amidst our most strenuous action the heart saith ever, 'Thy will be done,'-only as we strive to reduce our feverish hopes and fears about temporal enjoyment as nearly as we can to Nothing,-are we calm and brave, whatever may befal. This loving repose of Faith is Eternal Life, as sin is so much present death; it is a life lived, in harmony with the everlasting, above the restlessness of time;-it is (in Eckart's phrase, though not in Eckart's sense) a union with the Allmoving Immobility-the divine serenity of Love Omnipotent, guiding and upholding all without an effort. NOTE TO PAGE 248. 'The above is from the Sermon on the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 546. He says in this discourse that the soul has various names, according to the different operations and attributes belonging to it. It is called Anima, or soul; Spirit; and Disposition (gemüth), a marvellous and very lovely thing -for the memory, the understanding, and the will of man are all collected therein. The Disposition hath an objectum above the other powers, and as it follows or forsakes that aim so is it well or ill with the rest of man's nature. Fourthly, the soul is called mens or mensch (man), and that is the ground which is nameless, and wherein dwells hidden the true image of the Holy Trinity. (Compare Third Serm. on Third Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 305, and Serm. on Eleventh Sunday after Trin., ii. p. 435.) By the synteresis, or synderesis, Tauler appears to mean the native tendency of the soul towards God. With Tauler and the mystics generally this tendency is an original capacity for knowing God immediately. The term is not peculiar to the mystics, but it bears in their writings a signification which non-mystical theologians refuse to admit. The distinction usually made between ourpois and ovvednous is simply this: the former expresses that constitution of our nature whereby we assent at once to the axioms of morality, while the latter denotes that judgment which man passes on himself in conformity with such constitution of his moral nature. The second is related to the first somewhat as recollection is to memory. On this divine centre or substratum of the soul rests the fundamental doctrine of these mystics. So Hermann of Fritslar says, speaking of-di kraft in der sêle di her heizit sinderisis. In dirre kraft mac inkein krêatûre wirken noch inkein krêatürlich bilde, sunder got der wirket dar in âne mittel und âne underlâz. Heiligen leben, p. 187. Thus, he says elsewhere, that the masters speak of two faces of the soul, the one turned toward this world, the other immediately to God. In the latter God doth flow and shine eternally, whether man knoweth it or not. It is, therefore, according to man's nature as possessed of this divine ground, to seek God, his original; it must be so for ever, and even in hell the suffering there has its source in the hopeless contradiction of this indestructible tendency. NOTE TO PAGE 251. This passage is from the Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin., ii. p. 480. The same remarkable combination of inward aspiration and outward love and service is urged with much force and beauty in the Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity, and in that on the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, ii. p. 512. Tauler speaks of this Ground of the soul as that which is inseparable from the Divine nature, and wherein man hath by Grace what God is by nature. Predigten, ii. p. 199. He quotes Proclus as saying that, while man is busied with images, which are beneath us, and clings to such, he cannot possibly return into his Ground or Essence. If thou wilt know by experience that such a Ground truly is, thou must forsake all the manifold and gaze thereon with thine intellectual eye alone. But wouldst thou come nearer yet, turn thine intellectual eyesight therefrom-for even the intellect is beneath thee-and become one with the One-that is, unite thyself with Unity.' This unity Proclus calls the calm, silent, slumbering, and incomprehensible divine Darkness.' To think, beloved in the Lord, that a heathen should understand so much and go so far, and we be so behind, may well make us blush for shame. To this our Lord Jesus Christ testifies when he says the kingdom of God is within you. That is, this kingdom is born in the inmost Ground of all, apart from all that the powers of the mind can accomplish. . . . . In this Ground the eternal heavenly Father doth bring |