* 66

ground of their being, when they pray or perform other exercises, and find not God's presence, it vexes them; and this they do less, or less willingly, and say they have no experience of God. Therefore they grow weary of their pains-taking and praying. This a man should never do. We should never do a duty the less on such account; for God was present there, but we perceived him not. Yet he went secretly to the wedding. Where God is, there in truth is the wedding. And he cannot be away from it; where a man simply thinks of Him and seeks Him alone, there God must of necessity be, either sensibly or in a hidden manner." He adduces in illustration the case of the apostles. They must be deprived of visible intercourse with the Saviour; meantime they might have believed they were forsaken; but it was that they might be prepared for the invisible communion with the Saviour, and for the receiving of the Holy Ghost. "Children," he says,* as to this matter, it is seriously to be considered by us, and we must understand that, to the beloved disciples of God and his beloved friends, the Holy Ghost could not be given till Jesus Christ had first gone away from them. Not at all different than is coldness, want of comfort, ineptitude, so that we feel heavy and slow to every good work, and cold and dark; for thus has Christ departed from us. If all men would see into this, and make it profitable and fruitful to themselves, it were a useful, noble, blessed, divine thing." In another place he says, after citing the words of Christ, John xvi. 7. “The holy disciples were then possessed, within and without, with the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he so filled up every corner of their being-heart, soul, sense, and power of body and mind-that the possession must be out, or must be away. If they were to come to the true, spiritual, inward comfort, this possession must needs be cut away from them, however sour and bitter it might be to them; they would otherwise have to abide at the lowest stage, and in the senses." Accordingly he speaks of the various leadings of Providence connected with the internal

*Bas. ed. fol. 36 a; Fr. ed. II. p. 69.
Ibid. 48 b; Fr. ed. II. p. 122.

development of the soul, to which men ought simply to resign themselves, instead of choosing their own way. He says:*"God comes with terrible conflicts, and in wonderful events, and singular ways, which none can understand but he who experiences them. Men therefore have remarkable, mysterious sufferings among them, diverse forms of the bitter drug, so that they are at a loss which way to turn; but God knows well what he means by it all." He gives prominence to trust in Christ as a means of obtaining victory over all temptations, and says:† "When he (the devout man) cannot overcome the dogs he contends with, nor get rid of them, he should run in great haste to the tree of the cross and of the passion of our dear Lord Jesus Christ; there alone he may cleave asunder the heads of the dogs that assault him; that is, he there obtains the victory in all his conflicts, and is entirely delivered and rid of them."

The third individual whose character deserves to be portrayed with some minuteness, was Henry Suso of Suabia, a Dominican. He was born in the year 1300, and died in 1365. He was the author of various writings, composed in the form of dialogues and in other forms, in the German language, and afterwards translated into Latin, in which writings also we may discern the religious bent of this class of the Friends of God. He is no less remarkable than Tauler for giving prominence to the mediation of Christ as necessary to the attaining to true communion with God, and was thus distinguished from those pantheistic mystics who, without any mediation, were for sinking directly into the depths of the divine essence. Thus he represents Christ as saying: "No man may ascend to the divine heights, nor have any sweet foretaste of bliss, except he be first drawn by the image of my human lowliness and sorrow. The higher a man climbs without passing through my humanity, the lower he falls. My humanity is the way he should take, my sufferings the door through which he should press." The practical following after * Bas. ed. fol. 8 a; Fr. ed. I. p. 141.

+ Ibid. 28 b; Fr. ed. I. p. 161.

In his "Little book of Eternal Wisdom," Comp. Diepenbrock: Suso's Life and Writings. Regensburg, 1829, p. 249, (2nd ed. 1837, p. 181).

Christ was considered of more value by him than all transitory excitement of feeling. He makes Christ say: No man better shows forth how near my suffering comes to him, than he who bears it with me in the exhibition of good works. Dearer to me is an empty heart, regardless of earthly loves, and constantly diligent in pursuing the next duty after working out the example of my sufferings, than if thou wert continually complaining to me, and honouring my sorrow with as many tears of grief as ever drops of rain fell from the skies; for that thou mightest follow me was the end for which I suffered the bitter death; though thy tears also are well-pleasing and acceptable." Patience in suffering seemed to him of more value than miracles, as he says:* :* "Never was there so much gazing at a knight who has come off well at the tournament, as there is gazing of all the heavenly host at a man who comes off well in suffering. All the saints stand sureties for a suffering man; for they have already experienced it before, and cry out with common mouth that it is no poison, but a wholesome drink. Patience in suffering is greater than calling the dead to life, or other miraculous signs; it is a narrow way which opens richly onward to the gate of heaven."

Among the religious appearances which grew out of these times of distress and of excitement in Germany, and extended into the fifteenth century, belong, too, the processions of the Scourgers or Flagellants. It was first in Italy, in the thirteenth century, that, amid the contests carried on with the wildest extravagance of passion between the party friendly to the pope, and the party who went with the emperor,-the Guelphs and Ghibellines,— strong feelings of remorse followed suddenly after the tumult of these passionate contests. Vast bodies of men, girded with ropes, marched in procession, with songs and prayer, through the cities and from one city to another, calling on the people to repent. All hostilities ceased. The momentary impression produced by these singular processions was powerful, though it did not last long. Such processions spread from Italy to other countries.

* Life and Writings, p. 253, (2nd ed., p. 184).

In

Germany, in particular, the impression produced by the desolating ravages of the black death contributed to call forth such demonstrations; though even here, a lasting work of repentance by no means followed, in the case of most; but good men were forced to complain that avarice and every sort of selfish vice afterwards prevailed to a greater extent than ever.* Large bodies of men marched through Flanders, France, Germany, singing hymns and scourging themselves till the blood flowed freely. And as the civil magistrates and ecclesiastical authorities now found it necessary to interfere on account of the danger to civil and ecclesiastical order, and on account of the violation of public decency connected with the rapid spread of this fanatical tendency, Pope Clement VI., for example, forbidding these processions on penalty of the ban, it was necessarily driven (since those who were seized with this fanatical spirit would not abandon its impulse) into an opposition to the church which did not originally belong to it. The prevailing dissatisfaction with a corrupt church, and the opposition to that church which existed already in the age, impressed their own peculiar stamp on these appearances also; and in the next following times these processions took an heretical direction. Those who joined in them spoke of the corruptions of the church, predicted approaching judgments, announced that all the sacraments in the church were profaned by her pollutions and had lost their validity, that but one sacrament as they supposed remained, which was to copy, after their manner, the sufferings of Christ. Hence they were called cruci fratres. Many of them died at the stake.

* D'Achery, Spicil. III. 110: Nam homines fuerunt posta magis avari et tenaces, cum multo plura bona quam antea possiderent; magis etiam cupidi et per lites, brigas et rixas atque per placita seipsos conturbantes. Caritas etiam ab illo tempore refrigescere cœpit valde, et iniquitas abundavit cum ignorantiis et peccatis.