As a guide to such a new life, we possess a book about whose author nothing is known. Luther first made it known in print. The philologist, Franz Pfeiffer, has recently printed it according to a manuscript of the year 1497, with a modern German translation facing the original text. What precedes the book indicates its purpose and its goal: “Here begins the man from Frankfurt and saith many very lofty and very beautiful things about a perfect life.” Upon this follows the “Preface about the man from Frankfurt”: “Al-mighty, Eternal God hath uttered this little book through a wise, understanding, truthful, righteous man, his friend, who in former days was a German nobleman, a priest and a custodian in the German House of Nobles at Frankfurt; it teacheth many a lovely insight into Divine Wisdom, and especially how and whereby one may know the true, righteous friends of God, and also the unrighteous, false, free-thinkers, who are very hurtful to Holy Church.” By “free-thinkers” one may perhaps understand those who live in a merely conceptual world, like the “Master” described above before his transformation by means of the “Friend of God,” and by the “true, righteous friends of God,” such as possess the disposition of the “layman.” One may further ascribe to the book the intention of so working upon its readers as the “Friend of God from the Mountains” did upon the Master. It is not known who the author was. But what does that mean? It is not known when he was born and died, or what he did in his outer life. That the author aimed to preserve eternal secrecy about these facts of his outer life, belongs naturally to the way in which he desired to work. It is not the “I” of this or the other man, born at a definite point of time, who is to speak to us, but the “I-ness” in the depths whereof “the separateness of individualities” (in the sense of Paul Asmus’ saying[5]) must first unfold itself. “If God took to Himself all men who are or who have ever been, and became man in them, and they became God in Him, and it did not happen to me also, then my fall and my turning away would never be made good, unless it also happened in me too. And in this restoration and making good, I neither can nor may nor should do anything thereto save a mere pure suffering, so that God alone doeth and worketh all things in me, and I suffer Him and all His works and His divine will. But if I will not submit to this, but possess myself with egotism, _i.e._, with mine, and I, to me, for me, and the like, that hinders God so that He cannot work His work in me purely alone and without hindrance. Therefore my fall and my turning away remain thus not made good.” The “man from Frankfurt” aims to speak not as a separated individual; he desires to let God speak. That he yet can do this only as a single, distinct personality he naturally knows full well; but he is a “Friend of God,” that means a man who aims not at presenting the nature of life through