In the practical counsels given to the young novice to whom _The Mirror of Salvation_ is addressed, we may see Ruysbroeck’s ideal of that active life of self-discipline and service which the soul has now set in hand; and which he describes in greater detail in _The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage_ and _The Kingdom of God’s Lovers_. Total self-donation, he tells her, is her first need—‘choosing God, for love’s sake’ without hesitations or reserves; and this dedication to the interests of Reality must be untainted by any spiritual selfishness, any hint of that insidious desire for personal beatitude which ‘fades the flower of true love.’ This done, self-conquest and self-control become the novice’s primary duties: the gradual subduing and rearrangement of character about its new centre, the elimination of all tendencies inimical to the demands of Eternal Life; the firm establishment upon its throne of that true free-will which desires only God’s will. This self-conquest, the essence of the ‘Way of Purgation,’ as described and experienced by so many ascetics and mystics, includes not only the eradication of sins, but the training of the attention, the adaptation of consciousness to its new environment; the killing-out of inclinations which, harmless in themselves, compete with the one transcendent interest of life. Like all great mystics, Ruysbroeck had a strong ‘sense of sin.’ This is merely a theological way of stating the fact that his intense realisation of Perfection involved a vivid consciousness of the imperfections, disharmonies, perversities, implicit in the human creature; the need of resolving them if the soul was to grow up to the stature of Divine Humanity. Yet there is in his writings a singular absence of that profound preoccupation with sin found in so many mediæval ascetics. His attitude towards character was affirmative and robust; emphasising the possibilities rather than the disabilities of man. Sin, for him, was egotism; showing itself in the manifold forms of pride, laziness, self-indulgence, coldness of heart, or spiritual self-seeking, but always implying a central wrongness of attitude, resulting in a wrong employment of power. Self-denials and bodily mortifications he regarded partly as exercises in self-control—spiritual athletics—useful because educative of the will; partly as expressions of love. At best they are but the means of sanctity, and never to be confused with its end; for the man who deliberately passed the greater part of his life in the bustle of the town was no advocate of a cloistered virtue or a narrow perfectionism.