prayers and praises. He will miss real holiness for the same reason
that makes the pleasure-seeker miss real happiness. We must lose
ourselves in some worthy interest in order to find again both a
better self and an object higher than that which we sought. This the
German mystics in a sense knew well. There is a noble sentence of
Suso to the effect that "he who realises the inward in the outward,
to him the inward becomes more inward than to him who only
recognises the inward in the inward." Moreover, the recognition that
"God manifests Himself and worketh more in one creature than
another" ("Theologia Germanica"), involves a denial of the
nihilistic view that all the creatures are "ein lauteres
Nichts."[21] It would be easy to find such passages in all the
fourteenth-century mystics, but it cannot be denied that on the
whole their religion is too self-centred. There are not many maxims
so fundamentally wrong-headed and un-Christian as Suso's advice to
"live as if you were the only person in the world."[22] The life of
the cloistered saint may be abundantly justified--for the spiritual
activity of some of them has been of far greater service to mankind
than the fussy benevolence of many "practical" busybodies--but the
idea of social service, whether in the school of Martha or of Mary,
ought surely never to be absent. The image of Christ as the Lover of
the individual soul rather than as the Bridegroom of the Church was
too dear to these lonely men and women. Unconsciously, they looked
to their personal devotions to compensate them for the human loves
which they had forsworn. The raptures of Divine Love, which they
regarded as signal favours bestowed upon them, were not very
wholesome in themselves, and diverted their thoughts from the needs
of their fellow-men. They also led to most painful reactions, in
which the poor contemplative believed himself abandoned by God and
became a pray to terrible depression and melancholy. These fits of