salvation of the world to an occurrence which was relatively accidental,
to base the consciousness of eternity on the knowledge of a fact. This
would be a victory of time over eternity, a victory of irreligion over
religion.

I regard it as the greatest achievement of that great time that
spontaneous religion again became possible. Eckhart rediscovered the
divine nature of man; never has the consciousness of timeless eternity
been expressed as he expressed it in his tract, _On Solitude_. Doubtless
there have been men before him who possessed direct religious
intuitions, and now and then gave timid utterance to them; but the
authority of tradition has always been too great, and they never did
more than compromise between the historical events on which the
Christian religion is based and the genuinely religious experience of
their own souls. Eckhart, too, was careful not to offend against the
letter, and his pupils, after suspicion had fallen on them, made many a
concession in terms, and perhaps even in thought. St. Augustine already
had steered a middle course between the historical and the religious
conception, in his phrase: _Per Christum hominem at Christum deum_, and
Suso (in his _Booklet of Eternal Wisdom_) followed his lead. "Thus
speaks the eternal wisdom: If ye will behold me in my eternal divinity
ye must know and love me in my suffering humanity. For this is the
quickest road to eternal salvation." The brutality of the tenet which
maintains that all those are eternally lost who, without their own
fault, have no knowledge of the salvation of the world (especially
therefore, those who died before the event), was a stumbling-block to
many thoughtful minds. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were looked
upon as saved--to some extent--by the fact of their being the ancestors
or prophets of Christ; but pagans and Greeks, including Aristotle, were
condemned even by the great Dante. At the conclusion of his _Divine
Comedy_ Dante proved himself a truly inspired mystic, for he gave to us
the profoundest vision of the divinity which has ever been vouchsafed to
man. But his genius was directed and restricted by the dogmas of the
Church; his religious standpoint was the standpoint of the early Middle
Ages and dogmatic Catholicism. As poet and lover he was the inaugurator
of a new world; here he represents the culmination and conclusion of the
condemned world-system. He was the iron landmark of the ages--Eckhart,
the crea