one,” and that man must become more and more divine, more and more free from all that is unessential and accidental until he no longer differs from God.  It is only a logical conclusion to say that a perfect man, mystically speaking, is God; his being and his will are in nothing differentiated from absolute, universal, divine will—­German mysticism agrees in this with the Upanishads.  Kant would have said that the principles of such a man would become cosmic laws; sin would be the estrangement from God, the will to draw away from God.

The profound and only mission of religion is the endowment of man in this hurly-burly of life with the consciousness of eternity.  Religion places our transient life under the aspect of eternity, and therefore it must, in its essence, remain a stranger to things temporal.  Only that moment in the life of a man can be called religious which lifts him beyond himself, out of his petty, narrow existence, conditioned by and subject to accidents, into timeless, universal life; which gives him the certainty that historical events can never be regarded as definite and ultimate—­that moment which has the power to set free, to deliver, to save.  Thus it is irreligious to regard an event which occurred on the temporal plane—­and were it the greatest event which ever befell on earth—­as the pivot of metaphysical value for all men; to link the salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental, to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact.  This would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over religion.

I regard it as the greatest achievement of that great time that spontaneous religion again became possible.  Eckhart rediscovered the divine nature of man; never has the consciousness of timeless eternity been expressed as he expressed it in his tract, On Solitude.  Doubtless there have been men before him who possessed direct religious intuitions, and now and then gave timid utterance to them; but the authority of tradition has always been too great, and they never did more than compromise between the historical events on which the Christian religion is based and the genuinely religious experience of their own souls.  Eckhart, too, was careful not to offend against the letter, and his pupils, after suspicion had fallen on them, made many a concession in terms, and perhaps even in thought.  St. Augustine already had steered a middle course between the historical and the religious conception, in his phrase:  Per Christum hominem at Christum deum, and Suso (in his Booklet of Eternal Wisdom) followed his lead.  “Thus speaks the eternal wisdom:  If ye will behold me in my eternal divinity ye must know and love me in my suffering humanity.  For this is the quickest road to eternal salvation.”  The brutality of the tenet which maintains that all those are eternally lost who, without their own fault, have no knowledge of the salvation of the world (especially therefore,