and all around me, are fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.'

And so, my friends, though I have seemed to talk to you of great matters this night; of the making and the destruction of world after world: yet what does all I have said come to? I have not got one step beyond what the old Psalmist learned amid the earthquakes and volcanoes of the pastures and the forests of Palestine, three thousand years ago. have not added to his words; I have only given you new facts to prove that he had exhausted the moral lesson of the subject, when he said:

These all wait upon thee, that thou mayest give them their meat in due season.

Thou givest, and they gather: thou openest thy hand, and they are filled with good.

Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath; they die and return to their dust.

Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the earth.

But-The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever. The Lord shall rejoice in his works. Amen.

JOHN TAULER.

It is with great diffidence that I have undertaken to furnish a Preface to these Sermons.* It must always be an invidious task to stand toward a far wiser and better man than one's self in a relation which is likely, at every moment, to be mistaken either for that of a critic or that of a commentator.

The critic of Tauler, no man has a right to become, who has not first ascertained that he is a better man than Tauler.

The commentator of Tauler, no man has a right to become, who has a strong belief (as I have) that Tauler's Sermons need no comment whatsoever; but that all which is good and eternal in them will recommend itself at once to those hearts, let their form of doctrine be what it may, who have hold of, or are seeking after, Eternal Goodness.

The historical and biographical information which may be necessary for a right understanding of the man and his times, will be found in the Life and the Introductory Notice which are appended to the Sermons; while any notions of mine as to the genesis of Tauler's views, as to how much of them he owed to divines, how much to his own vital experiences, are likely to be equally unsafe and uninteresting. The English churchman of the present day, enjoying a form of doctrine far more correct than that of any other communion, and resting on the sound dogma

*The History and Life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler, of Strasbourg; with twenty-five of his Sermons, (Temp. 1340.)

that nothing is to be believed as necessary to salvation but what can be proved by Scripture, has (whether rightly or wrongly, I do not here ask) become so satisfied with the good fruit, as to think little of the tree which bore it. The Church controversies, and the metaphysical inquiries, by which, after many mistakes, and long struggles, that form of doctrine was elicited from Scripture, are to him shadows of the past, and " Schoolmen's questions." The element in the ancient worthies of the Church which is most interesting to him is their human sorrows, temptations, triumphs, with which, as having happened in men of like passions with themselves, they still can sympathize. They cannot, however, now understand how strong and generally just an influence those private and personal experiences had, in forming the opinions of the old worthies upon Scriptural doctrines, which we have been taught from childhood to find in Scripture, and are therefore astonished, if not indignant, that every one in every age did not find them there at first sight.

Thus, standing upon the accumulated labors of ages, we are apt to be ungrateful to those who built up, with weary labor, and often working through dark and dreary nights, the platform which now supports us. We complain impatiently of the blindness of many a man, without whom we should not have seen; and of the incompleteness of many a man's doctrine, who was only incomplete because he was still engaged in searching for some truth, which, when found, he handed on as a precious heirloom to us who know him not.

For the many, therefore, it will be altogether uninteresting for me to enter into any speculation as to the spiritual pedigree of Tauler's views. How far Philo-Judæus and the Brahmins may have influenced the Pseudo-Dionysius; how far the Pseudo-Dionysius may have influenced John Erigena; how far

that wondrous Irishman may have influenced Master Eckart; how far that vast and subtle thinker, claimed by some as the founder of German philosophy, may have influenced Tauler himself, are questions for which the many will care little; which would require to be discussed in a large volume, ere the question could not merely be exhausted, but made intelligible. Such matters may well be left for learned and largeminded men, to whom the development of Christian doctrine (both in the true and the false sense of that word) is a scientific study.

But let me express a hope, that such men will turn their attention more and more, not merely to the works of Tauler, but to those of his companions, and to that whole movement of the fourteenth century, of which Tauler is the most popular and easily accessible type, as to a most interesting and instructive page in the book of Christian, and indeed, of human, thought. I say human; for it will be impossible for them to examine the works of such men as Erigena, Tauler, Eckart, and Ruysbroch,_any more than those of the later mystics, whether Romish or Protestant, without finding that their speculations, whether right or wrong in any given detail, go down to the very deepest and most universal grounds of theology and of metaphysics; and howsoever distinctly Christian they may be, are connected with thoughts, which have exercised men of every race which has left behind it more than mere mounds of earth. They will find in the Greek, the Persian, and the Hindoo; in the Buddhist and in Mohammedan Sufi, the same craving after the Absolute and the Eternal, the same attempt to express in words that union between man and God, which transcends all words. On making that discovery, if they have not already made it, two courses will be open to them. They can either reject the whole of such thoughts as worthless, assuming that

anything which Christianity has in common with heathendom must be an adulteration and an interpolation; or, when they see such thoughts bubbling up, as it were spontaneously, among men divided utterly from each other by race, age, and creed, they can conclude that those thoughts must be a normal product of the human spirit, and that they indicate a healthy craving after some real object; they can rise to a tender and deeper sympathy with the aspirations and mistakes of men who sought in great darkness for a ray of light, and did not seek in vain; and can give fresh glory to the doctrines of the Catholic Church when they see them fulfilling those aspirations, and correcting those mistakes; and in this case, as in others, satisfying the desire of all nations, by proclaiming Him by whom all things were made, and in whom all things consist, who is The Light and The Life of men, shining forever in the darkness, uncomprehended, yet unquenched.

There is another class of readers worthy of all respect, who may be dissatisfied, if not startled, by many passages in these sermons. Men well skilled in the terminology of the popular religion, and, from long experience, well acquainted with its value, are apt to be jealous when they find a preacher handling the highest matters, and yet omitting to use concerning them the formulæ in which they are now commonly expressed. Such men I would entreat to have patience with, and charity for, a man whose character they must so heartily admire. Let them remember that many of our own formulæ are not to be found verbatim in Holy Writ, but have been gradually extracted from it by processes of induction or of deduction; and let them allow to Tauler, as far as is consistent with orthodoxy, Christian liberty to find likewise what he can in that Scripture, which he reveres as deeply as they do. Let them consider also, that most of those expressions of his which are