Morbid piety is often the product of physical as well as spiritual stuffiness; and Ruysbroeck wrote his great books out of doors, with light and air all round him, and the rhythmic life of trees to remind him how much stronger was the quiet law of growth than any atavism, accident, or perversion by which it could be checked. Thus, throughout his works, the accent always falls upon power rather than weakness: upon the spiritual energy pouring in like sunshine; the incessant growth which love sets going; the perpetual rebirths to ever higher levels, as the young sapling stretches upward every spring. What he asks of the novice is contrition without anxiety, self-discipline without fuss; the steady, all-round development of her personality, stretching and growing towards God. She is to be the mistress of her soul, never permitting it to be drawn hither and thither by the distractions and duties of external life. Keeping always in the atmosphere of Reality, she shall bring therefrom truth and frankness to all her words and deeds; and perform her duties with that right and healthy detachment which springs, not from a contempt of the Many, but from the secure and loving possession of the One. The disciplines to which she must subject herself in the effort towards attainment of this poise, will, like a wise gymnastic, produce in her a suppleness of soul; making the constant and inevitable transition from interior communion to outward work, which charity and good sense demand, easy and natural, and causing the spirit to be plastic in the hand of God. Such suppleness—the lightness and lissomeness which comes from spiritual muscles exercised and controlled—was one of the favourite qualities of that wise trainer of character, St. François de Sales; and the many small and irritating mortifications with which he was accustomed to torment his disciples had no other aim than to produce it. In the stage of development to which the Active Life belongs, the soul enjoys communion with Reality, not with that directness proper to the true contemplative, but obliquely, by ‘means,’ symbols and images; especially by the sacramental dispensation of the Church, a subject to which Ruysbroeck devotes great attention. As always in his system, growth from within is intimately connected with the reception of food and power from without. The movement of the self into God, the movement of God into the self, though separable in thought, are one in fact: will and grace are two aspects of one truth. Only this paradox can express the relation between that Divine Love which is ‘both avid and generous,’ and the self that is destined both to devour and be devoured by Reality.