The little book called the _German Theology_, by an unknown author, also belongs to the school of Eckhart. It is one of the most precious treasures of devotional literature, and deserves to be better known than it is in this country. In some ways it is superior to the famous treatise of à Kempis, _On the Imitation of Christ_, since the self-centred individualism is less prominent. The author thoroughly understands Eckhart, but his object is not to view everything _sub specie oeternitatis_, but to give a practical religious turn to his master's speculations. His teaching is closely in accordance with that of Tauler, whom he quotes as an authority, and whom he joins in denouncing the followers of the "false light," the erratic mystics of the fourteenth century. The practical theology of these four German mystics of the fourteenth century--Ruysbroek, Suso, Tauler, and the writer of the _German Theology_, is so similar that it is possible to consider it in detail without taking each author separately. It is the crowning achievement of Christian Mysticism before the Reformation, except in the English Platonists of the seventeenth century, we shall not find anywhere a sounder and more complete scheme of doctrine built upon this foundation. The distinction drawn by Eckhart between the Godhead and God is maintained in the _German Theology_, and by Ruysbroek. The latter, as we have seen,[268] does not shrink from following the path of analysis to the end, and says plainly that in the Abyss there is no distinction of Divine and human persons, but only the eternal essence. Tauler also bids us "put out into the deep, and let down our nets"; but his "deep" is in the heart, not in the intellect. "My children, you should not ask about these great high problems," he says; and he prefers not to talk much about them, "for no teacher can teach what he has not lived through himself." Still he speaks, like Dionysius and Eckhart, of the "Divine darkness," "the nameless, formless nothing," "the wild waste," and so forth; and says of God that He is "the Unity in which all multiplicity is transcended," and that in Him are gathered up both becoming and being, eternal rest and eternal motion. In this deepest ground, he says, the Three Persons are implicit, not explicit. The Son is the Form of all forms, to which the "eternal, reasonable form created after God's image" (the Idea of mankind) longs to be conformed.