§ 28. THE NEW MYSTICISM. 241
quoted in the acts of councils or by popes as have been the theologies of the Schoolmen, they represented, if we follow the testimonies of Luther and Melanchthon, an important stage in the religious development of the German people, and it is certainly most significant that the Reformation broke out on the soil where the mystics lived and wrought, and their piety took deep root. They have a perennial life for souls who, seeking devotional companionship, continue to go back to the leaders of that remarkable pietistic movement.
The leading features of the mysticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be summed up in the following prop- , ositions. ■ — ■
1. Its appeals were addressed to laymen as well as to clerics.
2. The mystics emphasized instruction and preaching, and, if we except Suso, withdrew the emphasis which had been laid upon the traditional ascetic regulations of the Church. They did not commend buffetings of the body. The distance between Peter Damiani and Tauler is world-wide.
3. They used the New Testament more than they used the Old Testament, and the words of Christ took the place of the Canticles in their interpretations of the mind of God. The Gerynan Theology quotes scarcely a single passage which is not found in the New Testament, and the Imitation of Christ opens with the quotation of words spoken by our Lord. Eckart and Tauler dwell upon passages of the New Testament, and Ruysbroeck evolves the fulness of his teaching from Matthew 25:6, "Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him."
4. In the place of the Church, with its sacraments and priesthood as a saving institution, is put Christ himself as the mediator between the soul and God, and he is offered as within the reach of all.
5. A pure life is taught to be a necessary accompaniment of the higher religious experience, and daily exemplification is demanded of that humility which the Gospel teaches.
6. Another notable feature was their use of the vernacular in sermon and treatise. The mystics are among the very earliest masters of German and Dutch prose. In the Intro-
2-42 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
duction to his second edition of the German Theology,, Luther emphasized this aspect of their activity when he said, " I thank God that I have heard and find ray God in the German tongue as neither I nor tliey [the adherents of the ohl way] have found Him in tlie Latin and Hebrew tongues." In this regard also the mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were precursors of the evangelical movement of the sixteenth century. Their practice was in plain conflict with the judgment of that German bishop who declared that the German language was too barbarous a tongue to be a proper vehicle of religious truth.
The religious movement represented by German and Dutch mysticism is an encouraging illustration that God's Spirit may be working effectually in remote and unthought-of places and at times when the fabric of the Church seems to be hopelessly undermined with formalism, clerical corruption and hierarchical arrogance and worldliness. It was so at a later day when, in the little and remote Moravian town of Herrnhut, God was preparing the weak things of the world, and the things which were apparently foolish, to confound the dead orthodoxy of German Protestantism and to lead the whole Protestant Church into the way of preaching the Gospel in all the world. No organized body survived the mystics along the Rhine, but their example and writings continue to encourage piety and simple faith toward God within the pale of the Catholic and Protestant churches alike.
A classification of the German mystics on the basis of speculative and practical tendencies has been attempted, but it cannot be strictly carried out.^ In Eckart and Ruysbroeck, the speculative element was in the ascendant ; in Tauler, the
1 See Preger, I. 8, and L'llmann, lieformatnren, II. 203. Harnack goes far when he denies all originality to the German mystics. Of Eckart he says, Dogmenycsch., III. 378, " I give no extracts from his writings because I do not wish to seem to countenance the error that the German mystics expressed anything we cannot read in Origen, Plotinus, the Areopagite, Augustine, Erigena, Bernard and Thomas Aquinas, or that they represented a stage of religious progress." Th6 message they announced was certainly a fresh one to their generation, oven if all they -said had hc^n said before. They spoke from the living sources of their own spiritual experience. They were not