It was just on this point that Luther most completely misapprehended Tauler. It is true that this mediæval mystic speaks strongly against any too great esteem of human activity, and that he also recommends the spiritual man, in certain circumstances, to “refuse all exterior works the better to devote himself with the necessary submission and in entire peace” to interior communication with his Maker and Highest Good, and, as he says, “to suffer God.”[606] But he does not thereby recommend man to long after a state without thought or will, or after mere nothingness—in order to magnify God and His powers alone; according to Tauler, grace does not work in the soul “without the co-operation of the understanding and the will.” _The Quenching of the “Good Spark in the Soul”_ Luther in the above recommendation to passivity falsely assumes that the soul is entirely corrupted by original sin and only offends God with its acts. This also appears clearly in the Commentary on Romans. Protestants themselves now admit that Luther deviated from the standpoint of the orthodox mystics, particularly from that of Tauler, and that “in the view of the mystics of the Middle Ages there is no doubt that the natural good in man outweighs the natural evil. The central point in which all the lines of mystic theology converge is this indestructible goodness.” So speaks a Protestant theologian.[607] In Gerson, the mystic whom Luther had studied in his early days at Erfurt, he must have met with the beautiful teaching, that the soul had received from God a natural tendency towards what is good, that this is “the virginal portion of the soul,” which is the “source and seat of mystical theology.”[608] Tauler is fond of treating of this “noble spark of fire in the soul,” of “this interior nobility which lies hidden in the depths.”[609] The Scholastics, too, unanimously teach this disposition to good which remains after original sin.