As so often happens with the Saints, Blessed John's love for the neighbour overflowed in tenderness for his brothers and sisters of the lower creation also. Knowing this trait, the Canons would remark to him on the approach of winter: "See, Father Prior, it is snowing already. What will the poor little birds do now?" And with expressions of heartfelt compassion this sublime mystic, who was habitually lost in dizziest heights of contemplation, would give instructions that the feathered choristers outside the cloister should not be abandoned to perish of hunger. Very frequently in his works Blessed Ruysbroeck takes occasion to treat of the Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and ever he speaks of this sacred mystery in terms of the most vivid faith and intense devotion, discussing it as a supreme proof of God's love for men, on a par with the gifts of Creation, the Incarnation, and Redemption. His biographers tell us of his personal love for the Blessed Eucharist, and especially of his ecstatic devotion in offering the great Sacrifice. To the close of his long life, even when his failing sight could no longer distinguish the figure of the Crucified stamped upon the Host, nothing but grave sickness could hold him back from daily celebration. Sometimes he swooned from the excess of the sweetness with which his soul was inundated during the canon of the Mass. On one such occasion not only did he faint, but he seemed on the point of expiring, so that the terrified server reported the matter to the Provost. Attributing the faintness to advancing age and weakness, the Superior was about to forbid the holy old man to celebrate any more, when Blessed John humbly besought him to forbear, assuring him that the swoon was due not to the failing of years but to the overpowering of divine grace, _non propter senium sed divinae gratiae collatum xenium_. "Even to-day," he added, "Jesus Christ appeared to me, and filling my soul with a deliciousness all divine, He said to my heart, _Thou art Mine and I am thine_." Such heavenly favours seem to have been by no means rare with our Saint. He was frequently ravished with a vision of Our Divine Lord in His sacred Humanity. Christ appeared to him, accompanied by His Blessed Mother and a numerous retinue of Saints, and conversed familiarly with him. On one such occasion, penetrating his whole being with a sense of wondrous sweetness, He greeted him with ineffable condescension thus: "Thou art My dear son, in whom I am well pleased." Then Jesus Christ embraced him and presented him to Our Lady and the attendant Saints with the words: "Behold My chosen servant!" VII Ruysbroeck's Tree