"Then you know nothing of the delights which God bestows, or of the delicious savour of the Holy Ghost," thought Ruysbroeck to himself, for he happened to overhear the words, and he proceeded tranquilly on his way. III False Mystics But with all his love of peace and retirement, when it was a question of guarding the integrity of the Faith and of warding off peril from immortal souls, Ruysbroeck hesitated not to stand in the breach; even though others of much higher position in the Church and of much higher repute for theological learning than the obscure chaplain of St. Gudule's should raise not a finger nor so much as utter a warning word. The student of history is well aware of the many and startling contrasts and contradictions presented by the Middle Ages. It was an epoch of magnificent virtues and of gross vices, of splendid heroism and of unspeakable cruelty, of superb generosity and of disgusting meanness, and, which is more to our point at present, of intense devotion and of the most revolting vagaries in doctrine and morals. While also on the one hand there was much genuine zeal, much earnest endeavour to reform crying abuses in Church and State; on the other hand hypocrites and fanatics abounded, who aimed at the destruction of the principle of authority on the plea of amending those in power, or who, the while they inveighed against the futility of a merely exterior religion and insisted on the supreme need of purity of heart, themselves fell into the excess of neglecting all external form, and at times all outward decency and observance of morality. In varying degrees these latter errors are to be encountered under one shape or another in every age; but at the period of which we treat they were especially intense and extreme. The _Beghards_ and the _Béguines_ (when and where these broke loose from ecclesiastical control), the _Flagellants_, the _Brethren of the Free Spirit_ were chief of a group of extravagant sects which afflicted the Church in Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands; while England at the same time was disturbed by the fanaticism of the Lollards. In general their peculiar tenets were a strange admixture of pantheism, false mysticism, apparent austerity, and very real immorality. The following is one of their characteristic propositions, condemned by Clement V. in the Council of Vienna, A.D. 1311-1312: "That those who are in the aforesaid grade of perfection and in the spirit of liberty (contemplatives) are not subject to human authority and are not obliged to obey any precepts of the Church, because (as they say) _where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty_."