ors of
true poetical grandeur when she spoke of the union of the soul with God.
"The dominion of the fire has yet to come. That is Jesus Christ in Whose
hands the Heavenly Father has laid the salvation of the world and the
Last Judgment. On the Day of Judgment He shall fashion cups of wondrous
beauty out of the crackling sparks; therein the Father will drink on His
festival all the holiness which through His dear Son He has poured into
human souls."

Emotional mysticism was the prevailing form of mysticism in those days;
even Eckhart's pupil, Suso, belonged to this class of mystics. This
vague sentimentalism saved many a mind from the rigid dogmas of the
Church, and as its vagueness could be interpreted in more than one way,
it caused very little offence; but these visions and ecstasies, which
are so often mistaken for true mysticism, have done much to bring the
latter into contempt with the seriously minded. Eckhart did not
acknowledge it as genuine mysticism and directly condemned it in many of
his writings; and as he rejected mystic sentimentalism, clearly divining
its pathological cause, so he also rejected asceticism and all religious
ceremonies. The evangelical poverty of the Franciscan monks was an
object of loathing to him. St. Francis (and thirty years before him
Peter Valdez) had naively interpreted the imitation of Christ as a life
of absolute poverty, and had been relentless in his denunciation of
worldly wealth, which every monk of his order had to renounce. He
himself never touched money, seeing in it the source of all evil. His
transcendent treasure was "Holy Poverty"; Jacopone wrote an ardent hymn
to "Queen Poverty," and even Thomas, the representative of Dominican
erudition, theoretically took up the cudgels on its behalf. But even in
the primitive Church the principle of worldly and spiritual poverty was
widely spread and encouraged. In the defence of poverty, which was
practically nearly always synonymous with idleness and begging, and
therefore roused much hostility among the people, Bonaventura pointed
out (in his treatise, _De Paupertate Christi_) that Jesus Himself had
never done any manual work. The universal preference for a contemplative
life encouraged the tendency, and the extreme charitableness of the
Middle Ages made its realisation possible. Work was frequently looked
upon as a punishment--a view which could easily be upheld by reference
to Adam's expulsion from Paradise--and inflicted upo