It might seem, indeed, as if all the high and noble aspirations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been lost and forgotten during the fourteenth and fifteenth. And yet it was not quite so. There was one class of men on whom the spirit of true nobility had descended, and whose works form a connecting chain between the great era of the Crusades and the still greater era of the Reformation. These are the so-called Mystics,—true Crusaders, true knights of the Spirit, many of whom sacrificed their lives for the cause of truth, and who at last conquered from the hands of the infidels that Holy Sepulchre in which the true Christian faith had been lying buried for centuries. The name of Mystics, which has been given to these men, is apt to mislead. Their writings are not dark or unintelligible, and those who call them so must find Christianity itself unintelligible and dark. There is more broad daylight in Eckhart and Tauler than in the works of all the Thomists and Scotists. Eckhart was not a dreamer. He had been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and his own style is sometimes painfully scholastic. But there is a fresh breeze of thought in his works, and in the works of his disciples. They knew that whenever the problems of man’s relation to God, the creation of the world, the origin of evil, and the hope of salvation come to be discussed, the sharpest edge of logical reasoning 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