Among the Friends of God are numbers both of men and women of every rank, abbots and farmers, knights and nuns, monks and artizans. There is Conrad, Abbot of Kaisersheim: there are the nuns of Unterlinden and Klingenthal, at Colmar and Basle, as well as the holy sisters of Engelthal; the knights of Rheinfeld, Pfaffenheim, and Landsberg; our rich merchant here, Rulman Merswin, and one, unworthy of so good a name, that holds this pen. Our law is that universal love commanded by Christ, and not to be gainsaid by his vicar. Some have joined themselves to us for awhile, and gone out from us because they were not of us; for we teach no easy road to heaven for the pleasing of the flesh. Many call us sectaries, Beghards, brethren of the Free Spirit, or of the New Spirit, and what not. They might call us by worse names, but we are none of these. The prophecies of some among us, concerning judgments to be looked for at the hands of God, and the faithful warnings of others, have made many angry. Yet are not such things needed, when, as Dr. Tauler saith, the princes and prelates are, too many of them, worse than Jews and infidels, and mere horses for the devil’s riding.[109] So far from wishing evil, we mourn as no others over the present woe, and the Friends of God are, saith Dr. Tauler again, pillars of Christendom, and holders off for awhile of the gathered cloud of wrath. Beyond all question, if all would be active as they are active in works of love to their fellows, the face of the times would brighten presently, and the world come into sunshine. It was but yesterday that in his sermon Tauler repeated the saying of one—an eminent Friend of God—‘I cannot pass my neighbour by without wishing for him in my heart more of the blessedness of heaven than for myself;‘—‘and that,’ said the good Doctor, ‘I call true love.’ Sure I am that such men stand between the living and the dead.[110]