Sect. 4. THE GERMAN MYSTICS AS GUIDES TO HOLINESS

THIS little volume is a contribution to a "Library of Devotion," and
in the body of the work the reader will be seldom troubled by any
abstruse philosophising. I have thought it necessary to give, in
this Introduction, a short account of Eckhart's system, but the
extracts which follow are taken mainly from his successors, in whom
the speculative tendency is weaker and less original, while the
religious element is stronger and more attractive. It is, after all,
as guides to holiness that these mystics are chiefly important to
us. This side of their life's work can never be out of date, for the
deeper currents of human nature change but little; the language of
the heart is readily understood everywhere and at all times. The
differences between Catholic and Protestant are hardly felt in the
keen air of these high summits. It was Luther himself who discovered
the "Theologia Germanica" and said of it that, "next to the Bible
and St Augustine, no book hath ever come into my hands whence I have
learnt or would wish to learn more of what God and Christ and man
and all things are. I thank God that I have heard and found my God
in the German tongue, as I have not yet found Him in Latin, Greek,
or Hebrew." The theology of these mystics takes us straight back to
the Johannine doctrine of Christ as the all-pervading Word of God,
by whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together.
He is not far from any one of us if we will but seek Him where He is
to be found--in the innermost sanctuary of our personal life. In
personal religion this means that no part of revelation is to be
regarded as past, isolated, or external. "We should mark and know of
a very truth," says the author of the "Theologia Germanica," "that
all manner of virtue and goodness, and even the eternal Good which