soning will turn, and the best defined terms
of metaphysics die away into mere music. They knew that the hard and
narrow categories of the schoolmen do greater violence to the highest
truths of religion than the soft, and vague, and vanishing tones with
which they tried to shadow forth in the vulgar language of the people the
distant objects which transcend the horizon of human understanding. They
did not handle the truths of Christianity as if they should or could be
proved by the syllogisms of our human reasoning. Nevertheless these
Mystics were hard and honest thinkers, and never played with words and
phrases. Their faith is to them as clear and as real as sunshine; and
instead of throwing scholastic dust into the eyes of the people, they
boldly told them to open their eyes and to look at the mysteries all
around them, and to feel the presence of God within and without, which the
priests had veiled by the very revelation which they had preached. For a
true appreciation of the times in which they lived, the works of these
Reformers of the Faith are invaluable. Without them we should try in vain
to explain how a nation which, to judge from its literature, seemed to
have lost all vigor and virtue, could suddenly rise and dare the work of a
reformation of the Church. With them we learn how that same nation, after
groaning for centuries under the yoke of superstition and hypocrisy, found
in its very prostration the source of an irresistible strength. The higher
clergy contributed hardly anything to the literature of these two
centuries; and what they wrote would better have remained unwritten. At
St. Gall, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the monks, the
successors of Notker, were unable to sign their names. The Abbot was a
nobleman who composed love-songs, a branch of poetry at all events out of
place in the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower
clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual
activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse
magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the
Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act
as clerical spies and confessors, began to fraternize in many parts of
Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry
and thirsty after religious teaching. They had been systematically
starved, or fed with stones. Part of the Bible had been translate