Now a great mystic is the product not merely of an untamed genius for the Transcendent, but of a moral discipline, an interior education, of the most strenuous kind. All the varied powers and tendencies of a nature which is necessarily strong and passionate, must be harnessed, made subservient to this one central interest. The instinctive egotism of the natural man—never more insidious than when set upon spiritual things—must be eradicated. So, behind these few outward events of Ruysbroeck’s adolescence, we must discern another growth; a perpetual interior travail, a perpetual slow character-building always going forward in him, as his whole personality is moulded into that conformity to the vision seen which prepares the way of union, and marks off the mystical saint from the mere adept of transcendental things. We know from his writings how large a part such moral purifications, such interior adjustments, played in his concept of the 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.