Illumination is an unstable period. The sun is rising swiftly in the heaven of man’s consciousness; and as it increases in power, so it calls forth on the soul’s part greater ardours, more intense emotional reactions. Once more the flux of God is demanding its reflux. The soul, like the growing boy suddenly made aware of the beauty, romance and wonder—the intense and irresistible appeal—of a world that had seemed ordinary before, flows out towards this new universe with all the enthusiasm and eagerness of its young fresh powers. Those powers are so new to it, that it cannot yet control or understand them. Vigorous and ungovernable, they invade by turns the heart, the will, the mind, as do the fevers and joys of physical adolescence; inciting to acts and satisfactions for which the whole self is hardly ready yet. “Then is thrown wide,” says Ruysbroeck, “the heaven which was shut, and from the face of Divine Love there blazes down a sudden light, as it were a lightning flash.” In the meeting of this inward and outward spiritual force—the Divine Light without, the growing Divine Spark within—there is great joy. Ecstasy, and that state of musical rapture, exceeding the possibilities of speech, which Ruysbroeck like Richard Rolle calls ‘ghostly song,’ are the natural self-expressions of the soul in this moment of its career.[38] In more than one book we find references to this ecstatic period: a period so strongly marked in his own case, that it became for him—though he was under no illusions as to its permanent value—one of the landmarks in man’s journey to his home. Looking back on it in later life, he sees in it two great phases, of which the earlier and lower at any rate is dangerous and easily misunderstood; and is concerned to warn those who come after him of its transitory and imperfect character. The first phase is that of ‘spiritual inebriation,’ in which the fever, excitement and unrest of this period of growth and change—affecting as they do every aspect of personality—show themselves in the psycho-physical phenomena which are well-known accompaniments of religious emotion in selves of a certain temperament. This spiritual delirium, which appears to have been a common phase in the mystical revivals of the fourteenth century, is viewed by Ruysbroeck with considerable distrust; and rightly attributed by him to an excitement of the senses rather than of the soul. At best it is but ‘children’s food,’ given to those who cannot yet digest ‘the strong food of temptation and the loss of God.’ Its manifestations, as he describes them, overpass the limits not merely of common sense but also of sanity; and are clearly related to the frenzies of revivalists and the wild outbreaks of songs, dance and ecstatic speech observed in nearly all non-Christian religions of an enthusiastic type. In this state of rapture, “a man seems like a drunkard, no longer master of himself.” He sings, shouts, laughs and cries both at once, runs and leaps in the air,