spiritual life; and the intimacy with which he describes each phase in the battle of love, each step of the spiritual ladder, the long process of preparation in which the soul adorns herself for the ‘spiritual marriage,’ guarantees to us that he has himself trodden the path which he maps out. That path goes the whole way from the first impulse of ‘goodwill,’ of glad acquiescence in the universal purpose, through the taming of the proud will to humility and suppleness, and of the insurgent heart to gentleness, kindness, and peace, to that last state of perfect charity in which the whole spirit of man is one will and one love with God.

Though his biographers have left us little material for a reconstruction of his inner development, we may surely infer something of the course which it followed from the vividly realistic descriptions in The Kingdom of Lovers and The Spiritual Marriage. Personal experience underlies the wonderful account of the ascent of the Spiritual Sun in the heavens of consciousness; the rapture, wildness and joy, the ‘fever of love’ which fulfils the man who feels its light and heat. Experience, too, dictates these profound passages which deal with the terrible spiritual reaction when the Sun declines in the heavens, and man feels cold, dead, and abandoned of God. Through these phases, at least, Ruysbroeck had surely passed before his great books came to be written.

One or two small indications there are which show us his progress on the mystic way, the development in him of those secondary psychic characters peculiar to the mystical type. It seems that by the time of his ordination that tendency to vision which often appears in the earliest youth of natural mystics, was already established in him. Deeply impressed by the sacramental side of Catholicism, and finding in it throughout his life a true means of contact with the Unseen, the priesthood was conceived by him as bringing with it a veritable access of grace; fresh power poured in on him from the Transcendent, an increase of strength wherewith to help the souls of other men. This belief took, in his meditations, a concrete and positive form. Again and again he saw in dramatic vision the soul specially dear to him, specially dependent on him—that of his mother, who had lately died in the Brussels Béguinage—demanding how long she must wait till her son’s ordination made his prayers effectual for her release from Purgatory. At the moment in which he finished saying his first Mass, this vision returned to him; and he saw his mother’s spirit, delivered from Purgatory by the power of the sacrifice which he had offered, entering into Heaven—an experience originating in, and giving sharp dramatic expression to, that sense of new and sacred powers now conferred on him, which may well at such a moment have flooded the consciousness of the young priest. This story was repeated to Pomerius by those who had heard it from Ruysbroeck himself; for “he often told it to the brothers.”

For twenty-six years—that is to say, until he was fifty years of age—Ruysbroeck lived in Brussels the industrious and inconspicuous life of a secular priest. It was not the solitude of the forest, but the normal, active existence of a cathedral chaplain in a busy capital city which controlled his development during that long period, stretching from the very beginnings of manhood to the end of middle age; and it was in fact during these years, and in the midst of incessant distractions, that he passed through the great oscillations of consciousness which mark the mystic way. It is probable that when at last he left Brussels for the forest, these oscillations were over, equilibrium was achieved; he had climbed ‘to the summits of the mount of contemplation.’ It was on those summits that he loved to dwell, absorbed in loving communion with Divine Reality; but his career fulfilled that ideal of a synthesis of work and contemplation, an acceptance and remaking of the whole of life, which he perpetually puts before us as the essential characteristic of a true spirituality. No mystic has ever been more free from the vice of other-worldliness, or has practised more thoroughly and more unselfishly the primary duty of active charity towards men which is laid upon the God-possessed.

The simple and devoted life of the little family of three went on year by year undisturbed; though one at least was passing through those profound interior changes and adventures which he has described to us as governing the evolution of the soul, from the state of the ‘faithful servant’ to the transfigured existence of the ‘God-seeing man.’ Ruysbroeck grew up to be a simple, dreamy, very silent and totally unimpressive person, who, ‘going about the streets of Brussels with his mind lifted up into God,’ seemed a nobody to those who did not know him. Yet not only a spiritual life of unequalled richness, intimacy and splendour, but a penetrating intellect, a fearless heart, deep knowledge of human nature, remarkable powers of expression, lay behind that meek and unattractive exterior. As Paul’s twelve years of quiet and subordinate work in Antioch prepared the way of his missionary career; so during this long period of service, the silent growth of character, the steady development of his mystical powers, had gone forward in Ruysbroeck. When circumstances called them into play he was found to be possessed of an unsuspected passion, strength and courage, a power of dealing with outward circumstances, which was directly dependent on his inner life of contemplation and prayer.

The event into which the tendencies of this stage of his development crystallised, is one which seems perhaps inconsistent with the common idea of the mystical temperament, with its supposed concentration on the Eternal, its indifference to temporal affairs. As his childhood was marked by an exhibition of adventurous love, so his manhood was marked by an exhibition of militant love; of that strength and sternness, that passion for the true, which—no less than humility, gentleness, peace—is an integral part of that paradoxical thing, the Christian character.

The fourteenth century, like all great spiritual periods, was a century fruitful in mystical heresies as well as in mystical saints. In particular, the extravagant pantheism preached by the Brethren of the Free Spirit had become widely diffused in Flanders, and was responsible for much bad morality as well as bad theology; those on whom the ‘Spirit’ had descended believing themselves to be already divine, and emancipated from obedience to all human codes of conduct. Soon after Ruysbroeck came as a boy to Brussels, a woman named Bloemardinne placed herself at the head of this sect, and gradually gained extraordinary influence. She claimed supernatural and prophetic powers, was said to be accompanied by two Seraphim whenever she went to the altar to receive Holy Communion, and preached a degraded eroticism under the title of ‘Seraphic love,’ together with a quietism of the most exaggerated and soul-destroying type. All the dangers and follies of a false mysticism, dissociated from the controlling influence of tradition and the essential virtue of humility, were exhibited in her. Against this powerful woman, then at the height of her fame, Ruysbroeck declared war; and prosecuted his campaign with a violence and courage which must have been startling to those who had regarded him only as a shy, pious, rather negligible young man. The pamphlets which he wrote against her are lost; but the passionate denunciations of pantheism and quietism scattered through his later works no doubt have their origin in this controversy, and represent the angle from which