The idea of deification startles and shocks the modern reader.  It astonishes us to find that these earnest and humble saints at times express themselves in language which surpasses the arrogance even of the Stoics.  We feel that there must be something wrong with a system which ends in obliterating the distinction between the Creator and His creatures.  We desire in vain to hear some echo of Job’s experience, so different in tone:  “I have heard Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee; therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”  The proper effect of the vision of God is surely that which Augustine describes in words already quoted:  “I tremble, and I burn.  I tremble, in that I am unlike Him; I burn, in that I am like Him.”  Nor is this only the beginner’s experience:  St. Paul had almost “finished his course” when he called himself the chief of sinners.  The joy which uplifts the soul, when it feels the motions of the Holy Spirit, arises from the fact that in such moments “the spirit’s true endowments stand out plainly from its false ones”; we then see the “countenance of our genesis,” as St. James calls it—­the man or woman that God meant us to be, and know that we could not so see it if we were wholly cut off from its realisation.  But the clearer the vision of the ideal, the deeper must be our self-abasement when we turn our eyes to the actual.  We must not escape from this sharp and humiliating contrast by mentally annihilating the self, so as to make it impossible to say, “Look on this picture, and on this.”  Such false humility leads straight to its opposite—­extreme arrogance.  Moreover, to regard deification as an accomplished fact, involves, as I have said (p. 33), a contradiction.  The process of unification with the Infinite must be a progressus ad infinitum.  The pessimistic conclusion is escaped by remembering that the highest reality is supra-temporal, and that the destiny which God has designed for us has not merely a contingent realisation, but is in a sense already accomplished.  There are, in fact, two ways in which we may abdicate our birthright, and surrender the prize of our high calling:  we may count ourselves already to have apprehended, which must be a grievous delusion, or we may resign it as unattainable, which is also a delusion.

These truths were well known to Tauler and his brother-mystics, who were saints as well as philosophers.  If they retained language which appears to us so objectionable, it must have been because they felt that the doctrine of union with God enshrined a truth of great value.  And if we remember the great Mystical paradox, “He that will lose his life shall save it,” we shall partly understand how they arrived at it.  It is quite true that the nearer we approach to God, the wider seems to yawn the gulf that separates us from Him, till at last we feel it to be infinite.  But does not this conviction itself bring with it