d
to a higher joy, a deeper peace, than anything which the world can
give us. There are many sentences which remind us of the Roman Stoics,
whose main object was by detachment from the world to render
themselves invulnerable. Not that Thomas a Kempis shrinks from bearing
the Cross. The Cross of Christ is always before him, and herein he is
superior to those mystics who speak only of the Incarnation. But the
monk of the fifteenth century was perhaps more thrown back upon
himself than his predecessors in the fourteenth. The monasteries were
no longer such homes of learning and centres of activity as they had
been. It was no longer evident that the religious orders were a
benefit to civilisation. That indifference to human interests, which
we feel to be a weak spot in mediaeval thought generally, and in the
Neoplatonists to whom mediaeval thought was so much indebted, reaches
its climax in Thomas a Kempis. Not only does he distrust and disparage
all philosophy, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas, but he shuns society and
conversation as occasions of sin, and quotes with approval the pitiful
epigram of Seneca, "Whenever I have gone among men, I have returned
home less of a man." It is, after all, the life of the "shell-fish,"
as Plato calls it, which he considers the best. The book cannot safely
be taken as a guide to the Christian life as a whole. What we do find
in it, set forth with incomparable beauty and unstudied dignity, are
the Christian graces of humility, simplicity, and purity of heart.

It is very significant that the mystics, who had undermined
sacerdotalism, and in many other ways prepared the Reformation, were
shouldered aside when the secession from Rome had to be organised. The
Lutheran Church was built by other hands. And yet the mystics of
Luther's generation, Carlstadt and Sebastian Frank, are far from
deserving the contemptuous epithets which Luther showered upon them.
Carlstadt endeavoured to deepen the Lutheran notion of faith by
bringing it into closer connexion with the love of God to man and of
man to God; Sebastian Frank developed the speculative system of
Eckhart and Tauler in an original and interesting manner. But
speculative Mysticism is a powerful solvent, and Protestant Churches
are too ready to fall to pieces even without it. "I will not even
answer such men as Frank," said Luther in 1545; "I despise them too
much. If my nose does not deceive me, he is an enthusiast or
spiritualist, who is conte