e fourteenth
century that we find it in Eckhart, the German mystic. "There is," he
writes, "something in the soul which is above the soul. . . . It is
absolute and free from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute
in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, for in
these there is distinction. . . . I have called it a power, sometimes
a light. . . . This light is satisfied only with the super-essential
essence." It is ever entering "into that unity where no man dwelleth,"
where there are no distinctions, "neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost".
It is the plain of the Great Silence, the centre of the immovable
peace, an Inner Sea whose still waters are nevertheless bounded by no
shores. It is the sense, rather it is the reality, of the Infinite in
man, that of which all seers have dreamed under many diverse forms. I
take it to be the Nirvana of Buddha, the eternal silence that follows
when the last of the avenues of sense has been passed, and the soul
enters at length into the possession of itself, that is, into the
recognition of its infinitude. It is what Jesus means when he speaks
of the faithful ones--they who have endured even to the end--entering
"into the joy of their Lord". It is the apostle's unspeakable peace,
"the peace of God, which passeth all understanding".

Another of the school of Eckhart, Tauler, gives his own experience, and
it is not dissimilar. He finds his soul "so grounded in God that it is
dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature". No man, he says, can
distinguish between the sunshine and the air. How much less the light
of the created and the uncreated Spirit! We are lost in the abyss
which is our source. "From the place whence the rivers of waters go
forth, thither do they return." [3] Those words always haunt one with
a sense of the mysterious. They seem to say that the beginning and the
end of all are the same--the abyss of the Infinite. Emerson believes
that man came forth thence, is there now, and abides there for ever.
And surely Tennyson's lines must occur to the memory of every one:--

When that which drew from out the boundless deep,
Turns again home.

To begin to think at all, is to be brought, at length, to thoughts such
as these--the thought of the Inner Sea, on whose still and boundless
waters all is silence, peace, God.

After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of
professional divines, or the denizens of the clois