Now, that which Plotinus considered an extraordinary occurrence, an experience perhaps only possible to elect spirits, men at length began to look upon as the truth of the normal relations between their Maker and themselves. Of course, so stupendous a change took centuries in evolution, and, naturally, the Christian Church and its clergymen gave it no sort of encouragement. It would never do to preach abroad that every man was his own priest, and so we wade through the whole of mediaevalism without finding any recognition of the great teaching. It is only when we are in the comparatively modern epoch of the 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:--