the royal garden," and says that she unconsciously gathered around her all the better spirits in France, as the wild thyme attracts the bees. Marsiglio Ficino had taught her to drink from the well of Christian Platonism;[164] and this mysticism, which had little to do with dogma, which allied itself naturally with the poetical sides of philosophy and morals which suggested great if indefinite thoughts about God,--_le Tout_, _le Seul Nécessaire_, _la Seule Bonté_,--the human soul and the intimate union between the two, was perhaps the abiding part of her ever-enlarging religious experience. Nicholas of Cusa, who tried to combine the old Scholastic with the new thoughts of the Renaissance, taught her much which she never unlearnt. She studied the Holy Scriptures carefully for herself, and was never weary of discussing with others the meaning of passages which seemed to be difficult. She listened eagerly to the preaching of Lefèvre and Roussel, and carried on a long private correspondence with Briçonnet, being passionately desirous, she said, to learn "the way of salvation."[165] Both Luther and Calvin made a strong impression upon her, but their schemes of theology never attracted nor subjugated her intelligence. Her sympathies were drawn forth by their disdain of Scholastic Theology, by their denial of the supernatural powers of the priesthood, by their proclamation of the power and of the love of God, and by their conception that faith unites man with God--by all in their teaching which would assimilate with the Christian mysticism to which she had given herself with all her soul. When her religious poems are studied, it will be found that she dwells on the infinite power of God, the mystical absorption of the human life within the divine, and praises passionately self-sacrifice and disdain of all earthly pleasures. She extols the Lord as the one and only Saviour and Intercessor. She contrasts, as Luther was accustomed to do, the Law which searches, tries, and punishes, with the Gospel which pardons the sinner for the sake of Christ and of the work which He finished on the Cross. She looks forward with eager hope to a world redeemed and regenerated through the Evangel of Jesus Christ. She insists on justification by faith, on the impossibility of salvation by works, on predestination in the sense of absolute dependence on God in the last resort. Works are good, but no one is saved by works; salvation comes by grace, and "is the gift of the Most High God." She calls the Virgin the most blessed among women, because she had been chosen to be the mother of the "Sovereign Saviour," but refused her any higher place; and in her devotions she introduced an invocation of Our Lord instead of the _Salve Regina_. This way of thinking about the Blessed Virgin, combined with her indifference to the Saints and to the Mass, and her undisguised contempt for the more superstitious ecclesiastical ceremonies, were the chief reasons for the