Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/380

 3^4 GERMANY. flicts, the alternations of hope and despair, oi ra^shing ecstasies and hideous temptations, with which God tried the neophyte who sought to ascend into the serene atmosphere of mystic illuminism —struggles and conflicts which form a strangely resembling pro- totype^'of those which for long years tested the steadfastness of John Bunyan. When at length the initiation was safely endured, God drew them to him, he illuminated their souls so that they be- came one with him; they were gods by grace, even as he is God by nature. Then they were in a condition of absolute sinlessness, and could enjoy the assurance that it would continue during life, so that at death they would ascend at once to heaven with no prehminary purgatory.* In many of their tenets and practices there is a strange rever- beration of Hinduism, aU the stranger that there can be no possi- ble connection between them, unless perchance there may be some elements derived from mystic Arabic AristoteUanism, which so strongly influenced scholastic thought.f As the old Brahmanic tapas, or austere meditation, enabled man to acquire a share of the divine nature, so the interior exercises of the Friends of God assim- ilated man to the Divinity, and the miraculous powers which they acquired find their prototypes in the Eishis and Eahats. The self- inflicted barbarities of the Yoga system were emulated in the efforts necessary to subdue the rebellious flesh ; Rulman Merswin, for in- stance, used to scourge himself with wires and then rub salt into the wounds. The rehgious ecstasies of the Friends of God were the counterpart of the Samadhi or beatific insensibility of the Hindu ; and the supreme good which they set before themselves was the same as that of the Sankhya school— the renunciation of the wiU and the freedom from all passions and desires, even that of salvation. Yet these resemblances were modified by the Chris- tian sense of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, and by the more practical character of the Western mind, which did not send its votaries into the jungle and forest, but ordered them, if laymen, to continue their worldly life ; if rich, they were not to despoil themselves, but to employ their riches in good works, and to discharge their duties to man as well as to God. Eulman Mers- t See Renan, Averro^s et V Averroisme, 3« t^. pp. 95, 144-6.
 * Jundt, pp. 37-9, 60-2, 83, 106-7, 166, 313.