There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is the _historical_. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death. What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only negative—it is a something which St. John does _not_ teach. I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned, and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use, in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal bestowments is wrong in his practice, however