§ 30. JOHN TAULER OF STRASSBUEG. 261
upon all legitimate toil, and praised good and faithful work as an expression of true religion. One, he said, " can spin, another can make shoes, and these are the gifts of the Holy Ghost ; and I tell you that, if I were not a priest, I should esteem it a great gift to be able to make shoes, and would try to make them so well as to become a pattern to all." Fidelity in one's avocation is more than attendance upon church. He spoke of a peasant whom he knew well for more than forty years. On being asked whether he should give up his work and go and sit in church, the Lord replied no, he should win his bread by the sweat of his brow, and thus he would honor his own precious blood. The sympathetic element in his piety excluded the hard spirit of dogmatic complacency. " I would rather bite my tongue," Tauler said, " till it bleed, than pass judgment upon any 'man.^ Judgment we should leave to God, for out of the habit of sitting in judgment upon one's neighbor grow self-satisfaction and arrogance, which are of the devil." ^
It was these features, and especially Tauler's insistence upon the religious exercises of the soul and the excellency of simple faith, that won Luther's praise, first in letters to Lange and Spalatin, written in 1516. To Spalatin he wrote that he had found neither in the Latin nor German tongue a more wholesome theology than Tauler's, or one more consonant with the Gospel. 2
The mood of the heretic, however, was furthest from Tauler. Strassburg knew what heresy was, and had proved her orthodoxy by burning heretics. Tauler was not of their number. He sought to call a narrow circle away from the formalities of ritual to close communion with God, but the Church was to him a holy mother. In his reverence igr the Virgin, he stood upon mediseval ground. Preaching on
1 Preger, III. 131 ; Miss Winkworth, p. 355.
2 Kostlin, Life of M. Luther, I. 117 sq., 120. Melanchthon, in the Preface to the Franf. ed. of Tauler said : "Among the moderns, Tauler is easily the first. I hear, however, that there are some who dare to deny the Christian teaching of this highly esteemed man." Beza was of a different mind, and called Tauler a visionary. See Schmidt, p. 160. Preger, III. 194, goes so far as to say that Tauler clearly taught the evangelical doctrine of justification.
262 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
the Annunciation, he said that in her spirit was the heaven of God, in her soul His paradise, in lier body His palace. By becoming the mother of Christ, she became the daughter of the Fatlier, tlie mother of the Son, the Holy Spirit's bride. She was the second Eve, who restored all that the first Eve lost, and Tauler does not hesitate to quote some of Bernard's passionate words pronouncing Mary the sinner's mediator with Christ. He himself sought her intercession. If any one could have seen into her heart, he said, he would have seen God in all His glory. ^
Though he was not altogether above tlie religious perversions of the mediaeval Church, John Tauler has a place among the godly leaders of the Church universal, who have proclaimed the virtue of simple faith and immediate communion with God and the excellency of the unostentatious practice of righteousness from day to day. He was an expounder of the inner life, and strikes the chord of fellowship in all who lay more stress upon pure devotion and daily living than upon ritual exercises. A spirit congenial to his was Whittier, whose undemonstrative piety poured itself out in liearty appreciation of his unseen friend of the fourteenth century. The modern Friend represents the mysterious stranger, who pointed out to Tauler the better way, as saying : —
What hell may be, I know not. This I know, I cannot lose the presence of the Lord. One arm, Humility, takes hold upon His dear humanity ; the other, Love, Clasps His divinity. So where I go He goes ; and better fire-walled hell with Him Than golden-gated Paradise without. Said Tauler,
My prayer is answered. God hath sent the man. Long sought, to teach me, by his simple trust, Wisdom the weary Schoolmen never knew.