In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous. The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all Christians _now_, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed. And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought really near to men only in the magical transformation of the Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—those who by grace are transformed from the created to the uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect and poor in spirit.