The life-giving life of union, once man has grown up to it, clarifies, illuminates, raises to a higher term, all aspects of the self: intelligence, no less than love and will. That self is now harmonised about its true centre, and finding ‘God in all creatures and all creatures in God’ finds them in their reality. So it is that Ruysbroeck’s long life of growth, his long education in love, bringing him to that which he calls the ‘God-seeing’ stage, brings him to a point in which he finds everywhere Reality: in those rhythmic seasonal changes of the forest life which have inspired his wonderful doctrine of the perpetual rebirth and re-budding of the soul; in the hearts of men—though often there deep buried—above all, in the mysteries of the Christian faith. Speaking with an unequalled authority and intimacy of those supersensuous regions, those mysterious contacts of love which lie beyond and above all thought, he is yet firmly rooted in the concrete; for he has reconciled in his own experience the paradox of a Transcendent yet Immanent God. There is no break in the life-process which begins with the little country boy running away from home in quest of some vaguely felt object of desire, some ‘better land,’ and which ends with the triumphant passing over of the soul of the great contemplative to the perfect fruition of Eternal Love. Ruysbroeck died at Groenendael on December 2, 1381. He was eighty-eight years old; feeble in body, nearly blind, yet keeping to the last his clear spiritual vision, his vigour and eagerness of soul. His death, says Pomerius, speaking on the authority of those who had seen it, was full of peaceful joy, of gaiety of heart; not the falling asleep of the tired servant, but the leap to more abundant life of the vigorous child of the Infinite, at last set free. With an immense gladness he went out from that time-world which, in his own image, is ‘the shadow of God,’ to “those high mountains of the land of promise where no shadow is, but only the Sun.” One of the greatest of Christian seers, one of the most manly and human of the mystics, it is yet as a lover, in the noblest and most vital sense of the word, that his personality lives for us. From first to last, under all its external accidents, we may trace in his life the activity—first instinctive, and only gradually understood—of that ‘unconquerable love,’ ardent, industrious, at last utterly surrendered, which he describes in the wonderful tenth chapter of _The Sparkling Stone_, as the unique power which effects the soul’s union with God. “For no man understandeth what love is in itself, but such are its workings: which giveth more than one can take, and asketh more than one can pay.” That love it was which came out from the Infinite, as a tendency, an instinct endowed with liberty and life, and passed across the stage of history, manifested under humblest inconspicuous forms, but ever growing in passion and power; till at last, achieving the full stature of the