It only remains to show how Tauler combats the fantastic errors into which some of the German mystics had fallen in his day.  The author of the German Theology is equally emphatic in his warnings against the “false light”; and Ruysbroek’s denunciation of the Brethren of the Free Spirit has already been quoted.  Tauler, in an interesting sermon[277], describes the heady arrogance, disorderly conduct, and futile idleness of these fanatics, and then gives the following maxims, by which we may distinguish the false Mysticism from the true.  “Now let us know how we may escape these snares of the enemy.  No one can be free from the observance of the laws of God and the practice of virtue.  No one can unite himself to God in emptiness without true love and desire for God.  No one can be holy without becoming holy, without good works.  No one may leave off doing good works.  No one may rest in God without love for God.  No one can be exalted to a stage which he has not longed for or felt.”  Finally, he shows how the example of Christ forbids all the errors which he is combating.

The Imitation of Christ has been so often spoken of as the finest flower of Christian Mysticism, that it is impossible to omit all reference to it in these Lectures.  And yet it is not, properly speaking, a mystical treatise.  It is the ripe fruit of mediaeval Christianity as concentrated in the life of the cloister, the last and best legacy, in this kind, of a system which was already decaying; but we find in it hardly a trace of that independence which made Eckhart a pioneer of modern philosophy, and the fourteenth century mystics forerunners of the Reformation.  Thomas a Kempis preaches a Christianity of the heart; but he does not exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of Mysticism.  The title by which the book is known is really the title of the first section only, and it does not quite accurately describe the contents of the book.  Throughout the treatise we feel that we are reading a defence of the recluse and his scheme of life.  Self-denial, renunciation of the world, prayer and meditation, utter humility and purity, are the road to a higher joy, a deeper peace, than anything which the world can give us.  There are many sentences which remind us of the Roman Stoics, whose main object was by detachment from the world to render themselves invulnerable.  Not that Thomas a Kempis shrinks from bearing the Cross.  The Cross of Christ is always before him, and herein he is superior to those mystics who speak only of the Incarnation.  But the monk of the fifteenth century was perhaps more thrown back upon himself than his predecessors in the fourteenth.  The monasteries were no longer such homes of learning and centres of activity as they had been.  It was no longer evident that the religious orders were a benefit to civilisation.  That indifference to human interests, which we feel to be a weak spot in mediaeval thought generally, and in the Neoplatonists to whom mediaeval