thought was so much indebted, reaches its climax in Thomas a Kempis.  Not only does he distrust and disparage all philosophy, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas, but he shuns society and conversation as occasions of sin, and quotes with approval the pitiful epigram of Seneca, “Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned home less of a man.”  It is, after all, the life of the “shell-fish,” as Plato calls it, which he considers the best.  The book cannot safely be taken as a guide to the Christian life as a whole.  What we do find in it, set forth with incomparable beauty and unstudied dignity, are the Christian graces of humility, simplicity, and purity of heart.

It is very significant that the mystics, who had undermined sacerdotalism, and in many other ways prepared the Reformation, were shouldered aside when the secession from Rome had to be organised.  The Lutheran Church was built by other hands.  And yet the mystics of Luther’s generation, Carlstadt and Sebastian Frank, are far from deserving the contemptuous epithets which Luther showered upon them.  Carlstadt endeavoured to deepen the Lutheran notion of faith by bringing it into closer connexion with the love of God to man and of man to God; Sebastian Frank developed the speculative system of Eckhart and Tauler in an original and interesting manner.  But speculative Mysticism is a powerful solvent, and Protestant Churches are too ready to fall to pieces even without it.  “I will not even answer such men as Frank,” said Luther in 1545; “I despise them too much.  If my nose does not deceive me, he is an enthusiast or spiritualist, who is content with nothing but Spirit, spirit, spirit, and cares not at all for Bible, Sacrament, or Preaching.”  The teaching which the sixteenth century spurned so contemptuously was almost identical with that of Eckhart and Tauler, whose names were still revered.  But it was not wanted just then.  It was not till the next generation, when superstitious veneration for the letter of Scripture was bringing back some of the evils of the unreformed faith, that Mysticism in the person of Valentine Weigel was able to resume its true task in the deepening and spiritualising of religion in Germany.

But instead of following any further the course of mystical theology in Germany, I wish to turn for a few minutes to our own country.  I am the more ready to do so, because I have come across the statement, repeated in many books, that England has been a barren field for mystics.  It is assumed that the English character is alien to Mysticism—­that we have no sympathy, as a nation, for this kind of religion.  Some writers hint that it is because we are too practical, and have too much common sense.  The facts do not bear out this view.  There is no race, I think, in which there is a richer vein of idealism, and a deeper sense of the mystery of life, than our own.  In a later Lecture I hope to illustrate this statement from our national poetry.  Here I wish to insist that even the Mysticism of the cloister, which is the least satisfying to the energetic and independent spirit of our countrymen, might be thoroughly and adequately studied from the works of English mystics alone.  I will give two examples of this mediaeval type.  Both of them lived before the Reformation, near the end of the fourteenth century; but in them, as in Tauler, we find very few traces of Romish error.