With regard to the doctrines of holy indifference and disinterested love, the German mystics are by no means so extreme as the French. Their views of the divine character were more profound and comprehensive; their heaven and hell were less external and realistic. A mysticism like theirs could not concentrate itself, as Quietism did, on the degrees and qualities of one particular affection. Their God was one who, by a benign necessity of nature, must communicate Himself in blessing, one whose love lay at the root of His being. ‘If men would only believe,’ cries Tauler, in one of his sermons, ‘how passionately God longs to save, and bring forth His Son in them!’ They care little for being themselves accused of making matter eternal, and creatures necessary to God, if they can free Him from the imputation of selfishness or caprice. And so they have no scruples as to whether it be not selfish and criminal to pray for our own salvation. In the sense of Tauler—a true and deep one—no man can say, ‘Thy will be done,’ and ‘Thy kingdom come,’ without praying for his own salvation. When Tauler seems to demand a self-abnegation which consents to perdition itself, he is to be understood in one of two ways: either he would say that salvation should be desired for the sake of God, above our own, and that we should patiently submit, when He sees fit to try us by withdrawing our hope of it; or that the presence and the absence of God make heaven and hell—that no conceivable enjoyment ought to be a heaven to us without Him, no conceivable suffering a hell with Him. But how different is all this from teaching, with some of the Quietists, that, since (as they say) God is equally glorified in our perdition and in our salvation, we should have no preference (if our love be truly disinterested) for the one mode of glorifying Him above the other. That any human being ever attained such a sublime indifference I shall not believe, until it is attested by a love for man as much above ordinary Christian benevolence, as this love for God professes to be above ordinary Christian devotion; for what is true of the principle of love, is true of its degrees—‘He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?’