Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history, prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days, rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme. Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will, and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father. From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons. ‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself, he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’ An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology. First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active, where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of the Soul, as the mystics term it.