unspeakable comfort?  How could we be aware of that infinite distance, if there were not something within us which can span the infinite?  How could we feel that God and man are incommensurable, if we had not the witness of a higher self immeasurably above our lower selves?  And how blessed is the assurance that this higher self gives us access to a region where we may leave behind not only external troubles and “the provoking of all men,” but “the strife of tongues” in our own hearts, the chattering and growling of the “ape and tiger” within us, the recurring smart of old sins repented of, and the dragging weight of innate propensities!  In this state the will, desiring nothing save to be conformed to the will of God, and separating itself entirely from all lower aims and wishes, claims the right of an immortal spirit to attach itself to eternal truth alone, having nothing in itself, and yet possessing all things in God.  So Tauler says, “Let a man lovingly cast all his thoughts and cares, and his sins too, as it were, on that unknown Will.  O dear child! in the midst of all these enmities and dangers, sink thou into thy ground and nothingness.  Let the tower with all its bells fall on thee; yea, let all the devils in hell storm out upon thee; let heaven and earth and all the creatures assail thee, all shall but marvellously serve thee; sink thou into thy nothingness, and the better part shall be thine.”  This hope of a real transformation of our nature by the free gift of God’s grace is the only message of comfort for those who are tied and bound by the chain of their sins.

The error comes in, as I have said before, when we set before ourselves the idea of God the Father, or of the Absolute, instead of Christ, as the object of imitation.  Whenever we find such language as that quoted from Ruysbroek, about “rising above all distinctions,” we may be sure that this error has been committed.  Mystics of all times would have done well to keep in their minds a very happy phrase which Irenaeus quotes from some unknown author, “He spoke well who said that the infinite (immensum) Father is measured (mensuratum) in the Son:  mensura enim Patris Filius.[276]” It is to this “measure,” not to the immeasureable, that we are bidden to aspire.

Eternity is, for Tauler, “the everlasting Now”; but in his popular discourses he uses the ordinary expressions about future reward and punishment, even about hell fire; though his deeper thought is that the hopeless estrangement of the soul from God is the source of all the torments of the lost.

Love, says Tauler, is the “beginning, middle, and end of virtue.”  Its essence is complete self-surrender.  We must lose ourselves in the love of God as a drop of water is lost in the ocean.