senting
himself from public worship and the Lord's Supper. When the Lutheran
authorities refused to permit the publication of some poems he had
written, because of their strong mystical tendencies, Scheffler resigned
his office and betook himself to Breslau, where he joined himself to a
group of Jesuits. Here he pursued the study of the medieval mystics of
the Roman Catholic Church, and in 1653 was confirmed as a member of that
communion. At this time he took the name of Angelus Silesius, probably
after a Spanish mystic named John ab Angelis.

In 1661 he was ordained a priest of the Roman Church. He became a
prolific writer and took special delight in directing bitter polemics
against the Church of his childhood. Of these writings, it has been well
said: "He certainly became more Roman than the Romans; and in his more
than fifty controversial tractates, shows little of the sweetness and
repose for which some have thought he left the Lutheran Church."

Scheffler, however, was a poet of the first rank. His poems, always
tinged by the spirit of mysticism, sometimes attain to sublime heights,
and again they descend to a coarse realism, particularly when he
describes the terrors of judgment and hell.

His hymns, on the other hand, are almost uniformly of a high order. They
are marked by a fervent love for Christ the heavenly Bridegroom, although
the imagery, largely based on the Song of Solomon, is sometimes
overdrawn, almost approaching the sensual. Few of his hymns reveal his
Catholic tendencies, and therefore they were gladly received by the
Protestants. Indeed, they came into more general use among the Lutherans
than among the Catholics. They were greatly admired by Count von
Zinzendorf, who included no less than 79 of them in his Moravian
collection.

The mysticism of Scheffler often brought him dangerously near the
border-line of pantheism. Vaughn, in his "Hours with the Mystics,"
compares Scheffler with Emerson, and declares that both resemble the
Persian Sufis. Something of Scheffler's pantheistic ideas may be seen in
the following lines:

God in my nature is involved,
As I in the divine;
I help to make His being up,
As much as He does mine.

And again in this:

I am as rich as God; no grain of dust
That is not mine, too: share with me He must.

Duffield, commenting on these astonishing lines, observes, "We need not
wonder that this high-flown self-assumption carried him to the