a personal
embodiment of this type of religion. But the German mystics of the
fourteenth century, with their mighty experience and their
extraordinary depth, carried him still farther in this direction. He
was so enthusiastic over that beautiful anonymous classic of mystical
religion, the _Theologia Germanica_, that he twice edited and published
it, declaring in his Preface that he had learned from it "more of what
God and Christ and man and all things are" than from any other book
except the Bible and St. Augustine. John Tauler, the great Dominican
preacher of Strasbourg, impressed him no less profoundly. "Neither in
the Latin nor the German language," he {7} wrote to Spalatin in 1516,
"have I ever found purer or more wholesome teaching, nor any that so
agrees with the Gospel." Both these great teachers of spiritual
religion helped him to see that complete confidence in and surrender to
the will of God is salvation--"Put off thy own will and there will be
no hell."

In Luther's earlier writings we come frequently upon passages which
reveal the way in which experience still saturates Faith for him, and
which exhibit the mystical depth of his Christianity at this period.
Commenting on the phrase, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20), in his
_Commentary on Galatians_[9] he says, "He [Christ] is my form, my
furniture, and perfection, adorning and beautifying my faith as the
colour, the clear light, the whiteness, do garnish and beautify the
wall. Thus are we constrained grossly to set forth this matter. For
we cannot _conceive_ that Christ is so nearly joined and united unto us
as the colour or whiteness is unto the wall. But Christ thus joined
and united unto me and abiding in me, liveth this life in me which now
I live; yea, Christ Himself is this life which now I live. Wherefore
Christ and I in this behalf are both one."[10] And in a famous passage
in the tract "On Christian Liberty," he declares that "Faith has the
incomparable grace of uniting the soul to Christ as bride to husband,
so that the soul possesses whatever Christ Himself possesses."

Not only was this Luther of the early period the hero of the people and
the prophet of a deep and inward religion, he seemed also to have
found, even more emphatically than had the Humanists, a far-reaching
principle of individualism which took the key from the Church and put
it into the hands of the Christian man himself. Salvation in its
essence, he sees, is con