man, which is “not I but Christ,” can be born in us.  The “birth of God (or Christ) in the soul” is a favourite doctrine of the later German mystics.  Passages from the fourteenth century writers have been quoted in my fourth and fifth Lectures.  The following from Giseler may be added:  “God will be born, not in the Reason, not in the Will, but in the most inward part of the essence, and all the faculties of the soul become aware thereof.  Thereby the soul passes into mere passivity, and lets God work.”  They all insist on an immediate, substantial, personal indwelling, which is beyond what Aquinas and the Schoolmen taught.  The Lutheran Church condemns those who teach that only the gifts of God, and not God Himself, dwell in the believer; and the English Platonists, as we have seen, insist that “an infant Christ” is really born in the soul.  The German mystics are equally emphatic about the annihilation of the old man, which is the condition of this indwelling Divine life.  In quietistic (Nominalist) Mysticism the usual phrase was that the will (or, better, “self-will”) must be utterly destroyed, so that the Divine Will may take its place.  But Crashaw’s “leave nothing of myself in me,” represents the aspiration of the later Catholic Mysticism generally.  St. Juan of the Cross says, “The soul must lose entirely its human knowledge and human feelings, in order to receive Divine knowledge and Divine feelings”; it will then live “as it were outside itself,” in a state “more proper to the future than to the present life.”  It is easy to see how dangerous such teaching may be to weak heads.  A typical example, at a much earlier date, is that of Mechthild of Hackeborn (about 1240).  It was she who said, “My soul swims in the Godhead like a fish in water!” and who believed that, in answer to her prayers, God had so united Himself with her that she saw with His eyes, and heard with His ears, and spoke with His mouth.  Many similar examples might be found among the mediaeval mystics.

Between the two ideas of essentialisation and of substitution comes that of gradual transformation, which, again, cannot in history be separated from the other two.  It has the obvious advantage of not regarding deification as an opus operatum, but as a process, as a hope rather than a fact.  A favourite maxim with mystics who thought thus, was that “love changes the lover into the beloved.”  Louis of Granada often recurs to this thought.

The best mystics rightly see in the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ the best safeguard against the extravagances to which the notion of deification easily leads.  Particularly instructive here are the warnings which are repeated again and again in the Theologia Germanica.  “The false light dreameth itself to be God, and taketh to itself what belongeth to God as God is in eternity without the creature.  Now, God in eternity is without contradiction, suffering, and grief, and nothing can hurt or vex Him.  But with God when He is made