Now the details of that career are these: John Ruysbroeck was born in 1293 at the little village of Ruysbroeck or Ruusbroec, between Brussels and Hal, from which he takes his name. We know nothing of his father; but his mother is described as a good and pious woman, devoted to the upbringing of her son—a hard task, and one that was soon proved to be beyond her. The child Ruysbroeck was strong-willed, adventurous, insubordinate; already showing signs of that abounding vitality, that strange restlessness and need of expansion which children of genius so often exhibit. At eleven years of age he ran away from home, and found his way to Brussels; where his uncle, John Hinckaert, was a Canon of the Cathedral of St. Gudule. Pomerius assures us that this escapade, which would have seemed a mere naughtiness in normal little boys, was in fact a proof of coming sanctity; that it was not the attraction of the city but a precocious instinct for the religious life—the first crude stirrings of the love of God—which set this child upon the road. Such a claim is natural to the hagiographer; yet there lies behind it a certain truth. The little John may or may not have dreamed of being a priest; he did already dream of a greater, more enticing life beyond the barriers of use and wont. Though he knew it not, the vision of a spiritual city called him. Already the primal need of his nature was asserting itself—the demand, felt long before it was understood, for something beyond the comfortable world of appearance—and this demand crystallised into a concrete act. In the sturdy courage which faced the unknown, the practical temper which translated dream into action, we see already the germ of those qualities which afterwards gave to the great contemplative power to climb up to the ‘supreme summits of the inner life’ and face the awful realities of God.