We recognise here a characteristic of all those who are greatest among men:  of Goethe, for instance, of Bach, or Kant:  namely, the correspondence of intense personality and the most highly developed objectivity; for the greatest personality ceases in the end to distinguish between itself and the world, has eradicated everything paltry, selfish and subjective and has become entirely objective, impersonal, divine.  St. Francis knew nothing of this consciousness.  “God has chosen me because among all men He could find no one more lowly, and because through my instrumentality He purposed to confound nobility, greatness, strength, beauty and the wisdom of the world.”  He was the disciple of the earthly Jesus, Who went through life the compassionate consoler of all those who were sorrowful.  But Eckhart aspired “to the shapeless nature of God.”  “We will follow Him, but not in all things,” he said of the historical Jesus.  “He did many things which He meant us to understand spiritually, not literally ... we must always follow Him in the profounder sense.”  Compared to the religion of Eckhart, the religion of St. Francis is the faith of a little child, picturing God as a benevolent old man.  Such a religion is equally true and sincere, but it represents an earlier stage on the road of humanity.  If Christianity were—­as we are occasionally assured—­the religion of Jesus, then the great mystics cannot be called Christians.  And yet St. Augustine’s:  “We are not Christians, but Christs,” was fulfilled in them.

The profoundest depth of European religion, of which Eckhart was the exponent, and which found artistic expression in Gothic art, was not sounded by music until very much later.  Bach, more emphatically in the High Mass and the Magnificat, but also in his purely instrumental music, brought the universal feeling of mysticism to absolute artistic perfection.  The deep religious sentiment which pervades the High Mass is so far above all cults, that it has no real connection with any historical faith—­it is pure consciousness of the divine.

The peculiar state of the soul, called mysticism, could never become popular, or exert any very great influence.  A few men, such as Tauler, Suso, Merswin, and the unknown author of the Theologica Germanica handed on—­not by any means always unadulterated—­the doctrine they had received from Eckhart—­which at all times appealed to a few thinkers—­but the real influence on the world and on history was reserved for the reformers.  The reformer, in his inmost nature, is related to the people; his soul is agitated by formulas and ceremonies, to which the mystic is indifferent; they are to him obstacles to his faith and he strains every nerve to destroy them.  He has every appearance of the truly free spirit, but he is secretly dependent on that against which he is fighting.  He suffers under its inefficiency; his deed is the final reaction against his environment; salvation seems to him to lie in the improvement of