pauperibus." _Taxa cancellariae apostolicae_, in E.
Friedberg: _Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts_,
1903, pp. 389 ff.

[6] Maitland: _Canon Law in the Church of England_, p. 100.

SECTION 4. THE MYSTICS

One of the earliest efforts to transcend the economy of salvation
offered by the church was made by a school of mystics in the fourteenth
and fifteenth {30} century. In this, however, there was protest
neither against dogma nor against the ideal of other-worldliness, for
in these respects the mystics were extreme conservatives, more
religious than the church herself. They were like soldiers who
disregarded the orders of their superiors because they thought these
orders interfered with their supreme duty of harassing the enemy. With
the humanists and other deserters they had no part nor lot; they sought
to make the church more spiritual, not more reasonable. They bowed to
her plan for winning heaven at the expense of earthly joy and glory;
they accepted her guidance without question; they rejoiced in her
sacraments as aids to the life of holiness. But they sorrowed to see
what they considered merely the means of grace substituted for the end
sought; they were insensibly repelled by finding a mechanical instead
of a personal scheme of salvation, an almost commercial debit and
credit of good works instead of a life of spontaneous and devoted
service. Feeling as few men have ever felt that the purpose and heart
of religion is a union of the soul with God, they were shocked to see
the interposition of mediators between him and his creature, to find
that instead of hungering for him men were trying to make the best
bargain they could for their own eternal happiness. While rejecting
nothing in the church they tried to transfigure everything. Accepting
priest and sacrament as aids to the divine life they declined to regard
them as necessary intermediaries.

[Sidenote: Eckhart, 1260-1327]

The first of the great German mystics was Master Eckhart, a Dominican
who lived at Erfurt, in Bohemia, at Paris, and at Cologne. The
inquisitors of this last place summoned him before their court on the
charge of heresy, but while his trial was pending he died. He was a
Christian pantheist, teaching that God was the only true being, and
that man was capable of reaching {31} the absolute. Of all the mystics
he was the most speculative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and
John Tauler were his discipl