Christ, thou must be transformed into His beauteous image by a constant, earnest contemplation thereof.”  It is possible that God may will to call thee higher still; then let go all forms and images, and suffer Him to work with thee as His instrument.  To some the very door of heaven has been opened—­“this happens to some with a convulsion of the mind, to others calmly and gradually.”  “It is not the work of a day nor of a year.”  “Before it can come to pass, nature must endure many a death, outward and inward.”

In the first stage of the “dying life,” he says elsewhere, we are much oppressed by the sense of our infirmities, and by the fear of hell.  But in the third, “all our griefs and joys are a sympathy with Christ, whose earthly life was a mingled web of grief and joy, and this life He has left as a sacred testament to His followers.”

These last extracts show that the Cross of Christ, and the imitation of His life on earth, have their due prominence in Tauler’s teaching.  It is, of course, true that for him, as for all mystics, Christ in us is more than Christ for us.  But it is unfair to put it in this way, as if the German mystics wished to contrast the two views of redemption, and to exalt one at the expense of the other.  Tauler’s wish is to give the historical redemption its true significance, by showing that it is an universal as well as a particular fact.  When he says, “We should worship Christ’s humanity only in union with this divinity,” he is giving exactly the same caution which St. Paul expresses in the verse about “knowing Christ after the flesh.”

In speaking of the highest of the three stages, passages were quoted which advocate a purely passive state of the will and intellect.[273] This quietistic tendency cannot be denied in the fourteenth century mystics, though it is largely counteracted by maxims of an opposite kind.  “God draws us,” says Tauler, “in three ways, first, by His creatures; secondly, by His voice in the soul, when an eternal truth mysteriously suggests itself, as happens not infrequently in morning sleep.” (This is interesting, being evidently the record of personal experience.) “Thirdly, without resistance or means, when the will is quite subdued.”  “What is given through means is tasteless; it is seen through a veil, and split up into fragments, and bears with it a certain sting of bitterness.”  There are other passages in which he is obviously under the influence of Dionysius; as when he speaks of “dying to all distinctions”; in fact, he at times preaches “simplification” in an unqualified form.  But, on the other hand, no Christian teachers have made more of the active will than these pupils of Eckhart.[274] “Ye are as holy as ye truly will to be holy,” says Ruysbroek.  “With the will one may do everything,” we read in Tauler.  And against the perversion of the “negative road” he says, “we must lop and prune vices, not nature, which is in itself good and noble.”  And “Christ Himself