centuries; and what they wrote would better have remained unwritten. At St. Gall, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the monks, the successors of Notker, were unable to sign their names. The Abbot was a nobleman who composed love-songs, a branch of poetry at all events out of place in the monastery founded by St. Gall. It is only among the lower clergy that we find the traces of genuine Christian piety and intellectual activity, though frequently branded by obese prelates and obtuse magistrates with the names of mysticism and heresy. The orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in 1208 and 1215, and intended to act as clerical spies and confessors, began to fraternize in many parts of Germany with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry and thirsty after religious teaching. They had been systematically starved, or fed with stones. Part of the Bible had been translated for the people, but what Ulfilas was free to do in the fourth century, was condemned by the prelates assembled at the Synod of Trier in 1231. Nor were the sermons of the itinerant friars in towns and villages always to the taste of bishops and abbots. We possess collections of these discourses, preached by Franciscans and Dominicans under the trees of cemeteries, and from the church-towers of the villages. Brother Berthold, who died in 1272, was a Franciscan. He travelled about the country, and was revered by the poor like a saint and prophet. The doctrine he preached, though it was the old teaching of the Apostles, was as new to the peasants who came to hear him, as it had been to the citizens of Athens who came to hear St. Paul. The saying of St Chrysostom that Christianity had turned many a peasant into a philosopher, came true again in the time of Eckhart and Tauler. Men who called themselves Christians had been taught, and had brought themselves to believe, that to read the writings of the Apostles was a deadly sin. Yet in secret they were yearning after that forbidden Bible. They knew that there were translations, and though these translations had been condemned by popes and synods, the people could not resist the temptation of reading them. In 1373, we find the first complete version of the Bible into German, by Matthias of Beheim. Several are mentioned after this. The new religious fervor that had been kindled among the inferior clergy, and among the lower and middle classes of the laity, became stronger; and, though it sometimes degenerated into wild fanaticism, the sacred spark was kept in safe hands by such men as Eckhart (died 1329), Tauler (died 1361), and the author of the German Theology. Men like these are sure to conquer; they are persecuted justly or unjustly; they suffer and die, and all they thought and said and did seems for a time to have been in vain. But suddenly their work, long marked as dangerous in the smooth current of society, rises above the surface like the coral reefs in the Pacific, and