This was the characteristic attitude of religious-minded men in the middle ages. If to us it may seem pathetically childish and superstitious, we should not judge it without remembering the epoch of which it was a part. When we reconstruct in imagination that historic moment, that peculiar inheritance and environment of the sixteenth century Europeans, it is hard to conceive how else they could have interpreted the world. Theirs was an age, we must remind ourselves, of violence and bloodshed, of greed, hypocrisy, lust, and faithlessness. Craft and cruelty reigned in places of power, and the minds of the common people groped in the obscurity of gross ignorance, made even darker by fitful flashes of superstition. The poor were ground down by tyrannies and oppressions, the powerful were tormented by constant dread of treachery and assassination. Plagues and pestilence, war and famine and drought, made physical existence miserable; priestly bigotry and dogmatism crushed all mental initiative. It is not surprising that humanity, in the midst of such conditions, failed to recognize, as the source of its beliefs, its own latent virtue; the wonder is rather that it succeeded in rising at all to the intuition of a holiness which, by a natural error, it conceived as entirely severed from itself. It was much to arrive at this point. The object of the present analysis is not to discredit the mediæval conception of the world, but, by pointing out its peculiarities, to throw light on the music which was one of its profoundest utterances. The most familiar, and in some respects the most characteristic, element of mysticism is its ecstatic, devout attitude towards the deity or Absolute it worships. The mystic throws himself on the ground before his God, so to speak, in an ecstasy of complete self-abandonment and surrender. He is utterly prone, passive, will-less. His worship is the most complete, the most devoted worship of which there is record. The Greek pagans might sacrifice a lamb or an ox at the altars of their gods, the mystic sacrifices nothing less than himself, his very personality. He desires no reciprocal relations with his deity, makes no reservations in his commerce with it, retains no claim to independence, seeks no special favors; what he longs for, whole-heartedly and with a passionate fervor, is complete absorption, utter annihilation. In the trances of the devotees, consciousness dwindles to a point, all sense of individuality lapses, perception, sensation, thought even, flag and cease, and there remains only a vast, vague sense of the infinite self in which the human self is dissolved and obliterated.