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or of all the ages. They stand apart from the logical development of doctrine and pursue a method of their own, which is always essentially the same. Cabasilas was a contemporary of John Tauler, for he died in 1354, while Tauler died but seven years later (in 1361). These two, the former in Greece, the latter in Germany, apparently having no connection one with the other, agree in their vital principles and join hands with the pseudo-Dionysius in the patristic period and with William Law in modern times. Like our Western mystics who were forerunners of the Reformation, but more openly and actively so, Nicolas Cabasilas was an opposing influence against the deadening formalism of the Greek Church. He wrote a mystical exposition of the liturgy to bring out its spiritual meaning. Other writers of this later period are Demetrius Cydonius, a contemporary of Cabasilas, who wrote on "Contempt of Death"—Simeon of Thessalonica, who comes about fifty years later, and whose book on The Faith, The Rites, and the Mysteries of the Church is a valuable storehouse of ecclesiastical archaeology—Marcus Eugenicus of Ephesus, the ablest opponent of the reunion which was supposed to have been effected at Florence, who also wrote a defence of the doctrine of eternal punishment in answer to John vii., Palæologus, who had objected to it as inconsistent with God's justice and man's frailty—Gennadius, afterwards known as George Scholarius, whom we have already met,^[1] forced to be a supporter of the union when at Florence, but afterwards its most energetic opponent. More popular by far than any of these works was the romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, a book which was to the Middle Ages what the Shepherd of Hermas had been to the early Church at Rome, and what Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress has become to modern readers. It was their favourite religious book, because concrete and dramatic. In fact it was the one religious novel of the time. In the Latin version of it, this book was even more widely read in the West than in its earlier Eastern home. It is found

1. See page 269.