JOHN TAULER, the mystic and Dominican preacher of Strasburg, whom Luther so favoured, was quite Catholic in his teaching; to attribute to him, as has been done, any Pantheistic ideas is to do him an injustice, and it is equally wrong to imagine that he forestalled Luther’s notions regarding grace and justification. Yet his fanciful and suggestive mode of expression, his language which voiced, not the conceptual definiteness of Scholasticism, but the deep feelings of the speaker, often allows of his words being interpreted in a way quite foreign to his real meaning. It was just this depth of feeling and this obscurity which attracted Luther. As his letters show, he breathed more freely while perusing Tauler’s writings, because they responded to his natural disposition and his moods, not the least point in their favour being the absence in them of those hard-and-dry philosophical and dialectical mannerisms which were hateful to him. Without even rightly understanding it, he at once applied the teaching of this master of mysticism to his own inward condition and his new, growing opinions; he clothed his own feelings and views in Tauler’s beautiful and inspiring words. His beloved mother-tongue, so expertly handled in Tauler’s sermons, was at the same time a new means of binding him still more firmly to the mystic. In Tauler the necessity of the complete surrender of the soul to the action of God, of indifference and self-abandonment, is strongly emphasised. To free oneself as far as possible of self; to renounce all confidence in oneself in so far as this implies self-love and the pride of the sinful creature; to accept with waiting, longing, suffering confidence God’s almighty working, this, with Tauler as with all true mystics, is the fundamental condition for a union through love with the most Perfect Being. Luther, in his false interpretation of Tauler, came to dream of a certain false passivity on man’s part, which he then expanded into that complete passivity which accompanies the process of justification. He thought that Tauler repudiated the doing of good works in his own sense. He fancied that in him he had an ally in his fight against the so-called self-righteous and holy-by-works. He quite overlooked the contrary exhortations to the practice of good works and all observances of the Church which the great mystic had so much at heart.[408]