Now it appears to me that this self-spiritualizing process which seeks by a refined asceticism to transcend humanity and creatureliness, is altogether a mistake. An ideal sufficiently high, and ever beyond us, is already given in the moral perfection of Christ Jesus. This desire to escape from all the modes and means of our human existence came not from Paul, but from Plato. It revives the impatience of that noble but one-sided, Greek ideal, which despised the body and daily life, abhorred matter as a prison-house, instead of using it as a scaffolding, and longed so intensely to become pure, passionless intellect. I know no self-transcendence, and I desire none, higher than the self-sacrifice of the good Shepherd, who laid down his life for the sheep. You will probably be reminded here of another great Platonist. Origen, also, makes a distinction between those who know Christ, according to the flesh, as he terms it, _i.e._, in his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and that higher class of the perfect, or _Gnostici_, who, on the basis of that fundamental knowledge, rise from the historical Christ to the spiritual essence of the Word. Origen, however, supposed that this communion with the Logos, or eternal Reason, might become the channel of a higher knowledge, illumining the _Gnosticus_ with a divine philosophy. With Tauler, on the contrary, the intellectual ambition is less prominent; and he who has ascended into the uncreated essence cannot bring down from thence any wisdom for this lower world. Thus, in our extract, he says that if the soul united to the word could perceive itself, it would seem altogether like God, and would appear possessed of all knowledge that ever was. Such is the _ideal_; but the first reflex act would dissolve that trance of absolute, immediate oneness, and restore the mystic to the humbling consciousness of a separate, actual self; and here lies the great difference between Tauler and Eckart. Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek say, that in these moments of exaltation the soul (above distinctions) is not conscious of its distinction as a separate, creature entity. Eckart says, not that the soul has, for a moment, forgotten all that is personal, and that parts it off from God, but that the distinction does not exist at all,—not that _we_ do not know ourselves as separate, but that _God_ does not. To draw the line between theism and pantheism, is not always easy; but I think it must lie somewhere hereabout.