for want of other depths and “profundities," descended into his own heart, boring terrible, dark passages—and at last recognised the truth that it was impossible for him to lead a contemplative, saintly life, and that his inborn activity would ruin him, body and soul. Hewasted but too much time in attempting to find his way to holiness by means of castigations—at last he made up his mind, saying to himself: "There is no real life contemplative. We have allowed ourselves to be duped.The saints were not worth more than the rest of us.” This was, indeed, a boorish way of carrying one's point, but for the Germans of that time it was the right and only way: how they felt edified when recalling in their Lutheran catechise, “With the exception of the ten commandments there is no work which could please God —the vaunted spiritual works of the saints are selfinvented."
89
‘’Doubt, a sin.’’—Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and proclaimed even doubt to be a sin.Without reasoning, by a sheer miracle, we are to be cast into faith, and thenceforth to float therein as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: a mere sideglance at a continent, the more thought that we may perhaps exist for other purposes than floating, the least impulse of our amphibious nature—is sin! Now mind, that thereby the foundation of belief and all meditation
