The strongly ascetic language of Tauler and his brethren, their almost Manichean contempt of the world, must be read by the light of their times, so full of misery and corruption; and by the light, also, of those fearful furnaces of trial through which they had personally passed. What soul, into which the iron has entered, will say, while the pain is still fresh, that the words of Tauler, or of Thomas à Kempis, are intemperate? It is probable that Tauler would have been less impatient to abolish his very personality, in order to give place to God, had he been able, like Luther, to regard salvation, in greater measure, as consisting in a work done _for_, as well as wrought _in_ him. But his justification is a progressive, approximate process. It is not a something he accepts, but a something he has to work out; and seeing, as, with his true humility, he was sure to do, how unsatisfactory was his likeness to God, how great the distance still, the only resource open to him is to ignore or annihilate that sorry and disappointing personality altogether, that God, instead of it, may perform his actions, and be, in fact, the substitute for his soul. Both Tauler and Luther believe in substitution. The substitution of Tauler is internal—God takes his place within himself. The substitution of Luther is external—when he believed in Christ, the Saviour associated him with Himself, and so brought him into sonship. So inevitable is the idea of _some_ substitution, where the sense of sin is deep. Luther believes as profoundly as Tauler in a present, inward, living Saviour, as opposed to a remote historic personage, intellectually acknowledged. In the theology of both the old dualism is broken down, and God is brought near to man, yea, within him. But the Son to whom Tauler is united, is the uncreated essence, the super-essential Word, from the beginning with the Father. The Son to whom Luther is united is emphatically the Godman, as truly human, in all sympathy and nearness, as when He walked the Galilean hills. The humanity of Christ is chiefly historic with Tauler, and for any practical purpose can scarcely be said to have survived His exaltation; but with Luther that humanity is so vital and so perpetual that he will even transfer to it the attributes of Deity. So far from desiring to pass upward from the man Christ Jesus to the Logos, as from a lower to a higher, Luther calls ‘that sinking himself so deep in flesh and blood,’ the most glorious manifestation of Godhead. He does not, with the Platonists, see degradation in the limitations of our nature; that nature has been honoured unspeakably, and is glorified, not annihilated, by the Incarnate One. According to Luther, the undivine consists in sin, and sin alone; not in our human means and modes, and processes of thought. Thus with him the divine and human are intimately associated, not merely in the religious life, as it is termed, but in our temporal hopes and fears, in every part of our complicated,