‘For us, to follow truly what God willeth, is to follow that whereto we are most inclined,—whereto we feel most frequent inward exhortation and strongest attraction. The inner voice is the voice of God.’[[88]]
After the service, Hermann left me to go and see a sick friend. I mingled with the crowd. There was a knot of people gathered before All-Saints, discussing what they had heard. A portly, capon-lined burgomaster declared he had first been hungry, then sleepy, and that was all he knew. He had verily, as a wag presently told him, obeyed the master, and lost consciousness of all external things. Whereat the jolly citizen was so tickled that he took the joker home to dine with him, promising mountains of pickled pork, a whole Black Forest of sauer kraut, and boundless beakers of hippocras.
An innocent novice from the country (looking fresh as a new-caught trout) began to say, ‘Well, it doth seem to me that though Doctor Eckart received his Doctorate from Rome, at the hands of our Holy Father, though he hath studied and taught at Paris, though he hath been Provincial of our order in Saxony, and Vicar-General in Bohemia—where he played the cat with the mice, I can tell you—yet that some things he said were——’
‘Hold your tongue for a jackass,’ quoth a senior brother, who liked not, methinks, to hear a whisper against the orthodoxy of the order, by whomsoever or against whomsoever uttered.
‘He is a blasphemer,’ said a friar. ‘Good people, did not you hear him say that what burned in hell was the Nothing?[[89]] Then nothing burns; ergo, there is no hell.’
‘I don’t think he believes in God at all,’ cried one:—‘Did he not say something about caring no more for God than for a stone?’
‘Ay, but,’ urged the friar, ‘no hell, and so no purgatory—think of that. Why, he has swept the universe as clean of the devil as a housewife’s platter at a christening.’
Some one in the crowd shouted out, ‘That fellow cares not what becomes of God, but he can’t give up his devil.’ Whereon the friar grew very red in the face, as we all laughed, but could not bethink him of any answer, and went capped with the name of Brother Brimstone ever after.
‘What was that he said,’ asked a slip-shod, sottish-looking tailor, ‘about doing what you like, and that is what God likes?’
‘Friends,’ cries next a rainbow-coloured, dandified puppy, a secretary of the bishop’s, stroking the down of a would-be moustache, evidently as yet only in a state of Becoming (Werden)—‘I would fain have moderately kicked him,——