‘God is a pure good in Himself, and therefore will He dwell nowhere save in a pure soul. There He may pour Himself out; into that He can wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that man should have turned himself away from all creatures, and have set his heart so entirely on the pure good, that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has no desire for aught creaturely, save as far as he may apprehend therein the pure good which is God. And as little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain, aught between it and God. To it all creatures are pure to enjoy, for it enjoyeth all creatures in God, and God in all creatures. Yea, so pure is that soul that she seeth through herself, she needeth not to seek God afar off, she finds him in herself, when, in her natural purity, she hath flowed out into the super-natural of the pure Godhead. And thus is she in God and God in her, and what she doeth that she doeth in God and God doeth it in her.[86] ‘Then shall a man be truly poor when he is as free from his creature will as he was before he was born. And I say to you, by the eternal truth, that so long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God, and have any desire after eternity and God, so long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires nothing.[87] ‘For us, to follow truly what God willeth, is to follow that whereto we are most inclined,—whereto we feel most frequent inward exhortation and strongest attraction. The inner voice is the voice of God.’[88] After the service, Hermann left me to go and see a sick friend. I mingled with the crowd. There was a knot of people gathered before All-Saints, discussing what they had heard. A portly, capon-lined burgomaster declared he had first been hungry, then sleepy, and that was all he knew. He had verily, as a wag presently told him, obeyed the master, and lost consciousness of all external things. Whereat the jolly citizen was so tickled that he took the joker home to dine with him, promising mountains of pickled pork, a whole Black Forest of sauer kraut, and boundless beakers of hippocras. An innocent novice from the country (looking fresh as a new-caught trout) began to say, ‘Well, it doth seem to me that though Doctor Eckart received his Doctorate from Rome, at the hands of our Holy Father, though he hath studied and taught at Paris, though he hath been Provincial of our order in Saxony, and Vicar-General in Bohemia—where he played the cat with the mice, I can tell you—yet that some things he said were——’ ‘Hold your tongue for a jackass,’ quoth a senior brother, who liked not, methinks, to hear a whisper against the orthodoxy of the order, by whomsoever or against whomsoever uttered.