“That measureless Love which is God Himself, dwells in the pure deeps of our spirit, like a burning brazier of coal. And it throws forth brilliant and fiery sparks which stir and enkindle heart and senses, will and desire, and all the powers of the soul, with a fire of love; in a storm, a rage, a measureless fury of love. These be the weapons with which we fight against the terrible and immense Love of God, who would consume all loving spirits and swallow them in Himself. Love arms us with its own gifts, and clarifies our reason, and commands, counsels and advises us to oppose Him, to fight against Him, and to maintain against Him our right to love, so long as we may.”[16] In the spiritual realm, giving and receiving are one act, for God is an ‘ocean that ebbs and flows’; and it is only by opposing love to love, by self-donation to His mysterious movements, that the soul appropriates new force, invigorating and fertilising it afresh. Thus, and thus alone, it lays hold on eternal life; sometimes sacramentally, under external images and accidents; sometimes mystically, in the communion of deep prayer. “Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink”—more, we too are His, for the love between God and man is a mutual love and desire. As we lay hold upon the Divine Life, devour and assimilate it, so in that very act the Divine Life devours us, and knits us up into the mystical Body of Reality. “Thou shalt not change Me into thine own substance, as thou dost change the food of thy flesh, but thou shalt be changed into Mine,” said the Spirit of God to St. Augustine; and his Flemish descendant announces this same mysterious principle of life with greater richness and beauty. “It is the nature of love ever to give and to take, to love and to be loved, and these two things meet in whomsoever loves. Thus the love of Christ is both avid and generous ... as He devours us, so He would feed us. If He absorbs us utterly into Himself, in return He gives us His very self again.”[17] This is but another aspect of that great ‘inbreathing and outbreathing’ of the Divine nature which governs the relation between the Creator and the flux of life; for Ruysbroeck’s Christological language always carries with it the idea of the Logos, the Truth and Wisdom of Deity, as revealed in the world of conditions,—not only in the historical Jesus, but also in the eternal generation of the Son. St. Francis of Assisi had said that Divine Love perpetually swings between and reconciles two mighty opposites: “What is God? and, What am I?” For Ruysbroeck, too, that Love is a unifying power, manifested in motion itself, “an outgoing attraction, which drags us out of ourselves and calls us to be melted and naughted in the Unity”;[18] and all his deepest thoughts of it are expressed in terms of movement.