“I have never comprehended this so clearly myself,” said she.  “But I have often felt how difficult it must be to know whether one loves who shows not a sign of love that could not be imitated.  And, again, I have thought that no one could know it unless he knew love himself, and that he could only believe in the love of another so far as he believed in his own love.  As with the gift of love so is it with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  They upon whom it descended heard a rushing from heaven as of a mighty wind, and there appeared to them cloven tongues like as of fire.  But the rest were either amazed and perplexed, or they made sport of them and said:  ‘They are full of sweet wine.’

“Still, as I said to you, it is the ‘German Theology’ to which I am indebted for learning to believe in my belief, and what will seem a weakness to many, strengthened me the most; namely, that the old master never stops to demonstrate his propositions rigidly, but scatters them like a sower, in the hope that some grains will fall upon good soil and bear fruit a thousand fold.  So our Divine Master never attempted to prove his doctrines, for the perfect conviction of truth disdains the form of a demonstration.”

“Yes,” I interrupted her, for I could not help thinking of the wonderful chain of proof in Spinoza’s ‘Ethics,’ the straining after demonstration by Spinoza gives me the impression that this acute thinker could not have believed in his own doctrines with his whole heart, and that he therefore felt the necessity of fastening every mesh of his net with the utmost care.  “Still,” I continued, “I must acknowledge I do not share this great admiration for the ’German Theology,’ although I owe the book many a doubt.  To me there is a lack of the human and the poetical in it, and of warm feeling and reverence for reality altogether.  The entire mysticism of the fourteenth century is wholesome as a preparative, but it first reaches solution in the divinely holy and divinely courageous return to real life, as was exemplified by Luther.  Man must at some time in his life recognize his nothingness.  He must feel that he is nothing of himself, that his existence, his beginning, his everlasting life are rooted in the superearthly and incomprehensible.  That is the returning to God which in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases.  But man cannot ignore the creation as the Mystics would.  Although created out of nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power resolve himself back into this nothingness.  The self-annihilation of which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking away of the human soul in Nirvana, as the Buddhists have it.  Thus Tauler says:  ’That if he by greater reverence and love could reach the highest existence in non-existence, he would willingly sink from his height into the deepest abyss.’  But this annihilation of the creature