A life which shall find place for the activities of the lover, the servant, and the apostle, is the goal towards which the great mystics seem to move. We have seen how the homely life of the priory gave to Ruysbroeck the opportunity of service, how the silence of the forest fostered and supported his secret life of love. As the years passed, the third side of his nature, the apostolic passion which had found during his long Brussels period ample scope for its activities, once more came into prominence. He was sought out by numbers of would-be disciples, not only from Belgium itself, but from Holland, Germany and France; and became a fountainhead of new life, the father of many spiritual children. The tradition which places among these disciples the great Dominican mystic Tauler is probably false; though many passages in Tauler’s later sermons suggest that he was strongly influenced by Ruysbroeck’s works, which had already attained a wide circulation. But Gerard Groot, afterwards the founder of the Brothers of the Common Life, and spiritual ancestor of Thomas à Kempis, went to Groenendael shortly after his conversion in 1374, that he might there learn the rudiments of a sane and robust spirituality. Ruysbroeck received him with a special joy, recognising in him at first sight a peculiar aptitude for the things of the Spirit. A deep friendship grew up between the old mystic and the young and vigorous convert. Gerard stayed often at the priory, and corresponded regularly with Ruysbroeck; whose influence it was which conditioned his subsequent career as a preacher, and as founder of a congregation as simple and unconventional in its first beginnings, as fruitful in its later developments, as that of Groenendael itself. The penetrating remarks upon human character scattered through his works, and the anecdotes of his dealings with disciples and penitents preserved by Pomerius, suggest that Ruysbroeck, though he might not always recognise the distinction between the weeds and vegetables of the garden, was seldom at fault in his judgment of men. An instinctive knowledge of the human heart, an unerring eye for insincerity, egotism, self-deception, is a power which nearly all the great contemplatives possess, and often employed with disconcerting effect. I need refer only to the caustic analysis of the ‘false contemplative’ contained in _The Cloud of Unknowing_, and the amusing sketches of spiritual self-importance in St. Teresa’s letters and life. The little tale, so often repeated, of the somewhat self-conscious priests who came from Paris to consult Ruysbroeck on the state of their souls, and received from him only the blunt observation—apparently so careless, yet really plumbing human nature to its deeps—“You are as holy as you wish to be,” shows him possessed of this same power of stripping off the husks of unreality and penetrating at once to the fundamental facts of the soul’s life: the purity and direction of its will and love.