delicate and intimate psychological analysis. The old mystic, sitting under his friendly tree, seems here to be gazing at and reporting to us the final secrets of that eternal world, where “the Incomprehensible Light enfolds and penetrates us, as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun.” There he tastes and apprehends, in ‘an unfathomable seeing and beholding,’ the inbreathing and the outbreathing of the Love of God—that double movement which controls the universe; yet knows, along with this great cosmic vision, that intimate and searching communion in which “the Beloved and the Lover are immersed wholly in love, and each is all to the other in possession and in rest.”

10. The Book of Supreme Truth (called in some collections The Book of Retractations, and by Surius, Samuel.)—This is the tract written by Ruysbroeck, at the request of Gerard Naghel, to explain certain obscure passages in The Book of the Kingdom of God’s Lovers. In it he is specially concerned to make clear the vital distinction between his doctrine of the soul’s union with God—a union in which the primal distinction between Creator and created is never overpassed—and the pantheistic doctrine of complete absorption in Him, with cessation of all effort and striving, preached by the heretical sects whose initiates claim to ‘be God.’ By the time that this book was written, careless readers had already charged Ruysbroeck with these pantheist tendencies which he abhorred and condemned; and here he sets out his defence. He discusses also the three degrees of union with God which correspond to the ‘three lives’ of the growing soul: union by means of sacraments and good deeds; union achieved in contemplative prayer ‘without means,’ where the soul learns its double vocation of action and fruition; and the highest union of all, where the spirit which has swung pendulum-like between the temporal and eternal worlds, achieves its equilibrium and dwells wholly in God, ‘drunk with love, and sunk in the Dark Light.’

11. The Twelve Béguines (De Vera Contemplatione).—This is a long, composite book of eighty-four chapters, which apparently consists of at least three distinct treatises of different dates. The first, The Twelve Béguines, which ends with chapter xvi., contains the longest consecutive example of Ruysbroeck’s poetic method; its first eight chapters being written in irregular rhymed verse. It is believed to be one of his last compositions. Its doctrine differs little from that already set forth in his earlier works; though nowhere, perhaps, is the development of the spiritual consciousness described with greater subtlety. The soul’s communion with and feeding on the Divine Nature in the Eucharist and in contemplative prayer; its acquirement of the art of introversion; the Way of Contemplation with its four modes, paralleled by the Way of Love with its four modes; these lead up to the perfect union of the spirit with God “in one love and one fruition with Him, fulfilled in everlasting bliss.” The seventeenth chapter begins a new treatise, with a description of the Active Life on Ruysbroeck’s usual lines; and at the thirtieth there is again a complete change of subject, introducing a mystical and symbolic interpretation of the science of astronomy. This section, so unlike his later writings, somewhat resembles The Spiritual Tabernacle, and may perhaps be a work of the same period. A collection of Meditations upon the Passion of Christ, arranged according to the Seven Hours of the Roman Breviary (capp. lxxiii. to end), completes the book; and also the tale of Ruysbroeck’s authentic works. A critical list of the reprints and translations in which these may best be studied will be found in the Bibliographical Note.