On this divine centre or substratum of the soul rests the fundamental doctrine of these mystics. So Hermann of Fritslar says, speaking of—di kraft in der sêle di her heizit _sinderisis_. In dirre kraft mac inkein krêatûre wirken noch inkein krêatûrlîch bilde, sunder got der wirket dar in âne mittel und âne underlâz. _Heiligenleben_, p. 187. Thus, he says elsewhere, that the masters speak of two faces of the soul, the one turned toward this world, the other immediately to God. In the latter God doth flow and shine eternally, whether man knoweth it or not. It is, therefore, according to man’s nature as possessed of this divine ground, to seek God, his original; it must be so for ever, and even in hell the suffering there has its source in the hopeless contradiction of this indestructible tendency. Note to page 251. This passage is from the _Third Serm. on Thirteenth Sun. after Trin._, ii. p. 480. The same remarkable combination of inward aspiration and outward love and service is urged with much force and beauty in the _Sermon on Fifth Sunday after Trinity_, and in that on the _Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity_, ii. p. 512. Tauler speaks of this Ground of the soul as that which is inseparable from the Divine nature, and wherein man hath by Grace what God is by nature. _Predigten_, ii. p. 199. He quotes Proclus as saying that, while man is busied with images, which are beneath us, and clings to such, he cannot possibly return into his Ground or Essence. ‘If thou wilt know by experience that such a Ground truly is, thou must forsake all the manifold and gaze thereon with thine intellectual eye alone. But wouldst thou come nearer yet, turn thine intellectual eyesight therefrom—for even the intellect is beneath thee—and become one with the One—that is, unite thyself with Unity.’ This unity Proclus calls the ‘calm, silent, slumbering, and incomprehensible divine Darkness.’ ‘To think, beloved in the Lord, that a heathen should understand so much and go so far, and we be so behind, may well make us blush for shame. To this our Lord Jesus Christ testifies when he says the kingdom of God is within you. That is, this kingdom is born in the inmost Ground of all, apart from all that the powers of the mind can accomplish.... In this Ground the eternal heavenly Father doth bring forth his only-begotten Son, a hundred thousand times quicker than an instant, according to our apprehension,—ever anew in the light of Eternity, in the glory and unutterable brightness of his own Self. He who would experience this must turn himself inward far away from all working of his outward and inward powers and imaginations—from all that ever cometh from without, and then sink and dissolve himself in the Ground. Then cometh the power of the Father, and calls the man into Himself through his only-begotten Son; and so the Son is born out of the Father and returneth unto the Father, and such a man is born in the Son of the Father, and floweth