[Footnote 1:  Master Eckhart’s Works have been edited by F. Pfeiffer, Leipsic, 1857.  The following have written on him:  Jos.  Bach, Vienna, 1864; Ad.  Lasson, Berlin, 1868; the same, in the second part of Ueberweg’s Grundriss, last section; Denifle, in the Archiv fuer Litteratur und Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters. ii. 417 seq.; H. Siebeck, Der Begriff des Gemuts in der deutschen Mystik (Beitraege zur Entstehungsgeschichte der neueren Psychologie, i), Giessen Programme, 1891.]

Luther himself was originally a mystic, with a high appreciation of Tauler and Thomas a Kempis, and published in 1518 that attractive little book by an anonymous Frankfort author, the German Theology.  When, later, he fell into literalism, it was the mysticism of German Protestantism which, in opposition to the new orthodoxy, held fast to the original principle of the Reformation, i.e., to the principle that faith is not assent to historical facts, not the acceptance of dogmas, but an inner experience, a renewal of the whole man.  Religion and theology must not be confounded.  Religion is not doctrine, but a new birth.  With Schwenckfeld, and also with Franck, mysticism is still essentially pietism; with Weigel, and by the addition of ideas from Paracelsus, it is transformed into theosophy, and as such reaches its culmination in Boehme.

Caspar Schwenckfeld sought to spiritualize the Lutheran movement and protested against its being made into a pastors’ religion.  Though he had been aroused by Luther’s pioneer feat, he soon saw that the latter had not gone far enough; and in his Letter on the Eucharist, 1527, he defined the points of difference between Luther’s view of the Sacrament and his own.  Luther, he maintained, had fallen back to an historical view of faith, whereas the faith which saves can never consist in the outward acceptance of an historical fact.  He who makes salvation dependent on preaching and the Sacrament, confuses the invisible and the visible Church, Ecclesia interna and externa.  The layman is his own priest.

According to Sebastian Franck (1500-45), there are in man, as in everything else, two principles, one divine and one selfish, Christ and Adam, an inner and an outer man; if he submits himself to the former (by a timeless choice), he is spiritual, if to the latter, carnal.  God is not the cause of sin, but man, who turns the divine power to good or evil.  He who denies himself to live God is a Christian, whether he knows and confesses the Gospel or not.  Faith does not consist in assent, but in inner transformation.  The historical element in Christianity and its ceremonial observances are only the external form and garb (its “figure"), have merely a symbolic significance as media of communication, as forms of revelation for the eternal truth, proclaimed but not founded by Christ; the Bible is merely the shadow of the living Word of God.