The schoolmen of the 13th century, with the exception of Bonaventura, had little sympathy with mysticism, and gave their whole attention to the development of doctrine (§ 99, 1). The 14th century was the Augustan age of mysticism. Germany, which had already in the previous period given Hugo of St. Victor and the two divines of Reichersberg (§ 102, 4, 6), was its proper home. Its most distinguished representatives belonged to the preaching orders, and its recognised grand-master was the Dominican Meister Eckhart. This specifically German mysticism cast away completely the scholastic modes of thought and expression, and sought to arrive at Christian truth by entirely new paths. It appealed, not to the understanding and cultured reason of the learned, but to the hearts and spirits of the people, in order to point them the surest way to union with God. The mystics therefore wrote neither commentaries on the Lombard nor gigantic _summæ_ of their own composition, but wrought by word and writing to meet immediate pressing needs. They preached lively sermons and wrote short treatises, not in Latin, but in the homely mother tongue. This popular form however did not prevent them from conveying to their readers and hearers profound thoughts, the result of keen speculation; but that in this they did not go over the heads of the people is shown by the crowds that flocked to their preaching. The “Friends of God” proved a spiritual power over many lands (§ 116, 4). From the practical prophetic mysticism of the 12th and 13th centuries (§§ 107; 108, 5) it was distinguished by avoiding the visionary apocalyptic and magnetic somnambulistic elements through a better appreciation of science; and from the scholastic mysticism of that earlier age (§§ 102, 3, 4, 6; 103, 4) by abandoning allegory and the scholastic framework for the elevation of the soul to God, as well as by indulgence in a somewhat pantheistic speculation on God and the world, man and the God-Man, on the incarnation and birth of God in us, on our redemption, sanctification, and final restoration. Its younger representatives however cut off all pantheistic excrescences, and thus became more practical and edifying, though indeed with the loss of speculative power. In this way they brought themselves more into sympathy with another mystic tendency which was spreading through the Netherlands under the influence of the Flemish canon, John of Ruysbroek. In France too mysticism again made its appearance during the 15th century in the persons of d’Ailly and Gerson (§ 118, 4), in a form similar to that which it had assumed during the 12th and 13th centuries in the Victorines and Bonaventura.