We have seen that Ruysbroeck, in common with a few other supreme mystics, declares to us as veritably known and experienced by him, a universe of three orders—Becoming, Being, God—and further, three ways of life whereby the self can correspond to these three orders, and which he calls the life of nature, the life of grace, the life of glory. ‘Glory,’ which has been degraded by the usage of popular piety into a vague superlative, and finally left in the hands of hymn-writers and religious revivalists, is one of the most ancient technical terms of Christian mysticism. Of Scriptural origin, from the fourth century to the fifteenth it was used to denote a definite kind of enhanced life, a final achievement of Reality—the unmediated radiance of God—which the gift of ‘divine sonship’ made possible to the soul. In the life of grace, that soul transcends conditions in virtue of a Divine vitality poured in from the Absolute Sphere, and actualises its true being, (_Wesen_); in the life of glory, it becomes a denizen of that sphere, and achieves an existence that is ‘more than being’ (_Overwesen_). The note of the first state is contemplation, awareness; the note of the second is fruition, possession. That power of making ‘swift and loving ascents’ to the plane of _Onwise_ to which man attained at the end of the Interior Life, that conscious harmony with the Divine Will which then became the controlling factor of his active career, cannot be the end of the process of transcendence. The soul now hungers and thirsts for a more intense Reality, a closer contact with ‘Him who is measureless’; a deeper and deeper penetration into the burning heart of the universe. Though contemplation seems to have reached its term, love goes on, to ‘lose itself upon the heights.’ Beyond both the conditioned and unconditioned world, beyond the Trinity Itself, that love discerns its ultimate objective—the very Godhead, the Divine Unity, “where all lines find their end”; where “we are satisfied and overflowing, and with Him beyond ourselves eternally fulfilled.”[68] The abiding life which is there discoverable, is not only ‘without manner’ but ‘above manner’—the ‘deified life,’ indescribable save by the oblique methods of music or poetry, wherein, in Maeterlinck’s great phrase, “the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.” All Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful passages are concerned with the desperate attempt to tell us of this ‘life,’ this utter fruition of Reality: which seems at one time to involve for the contemplative consciousness a self-mergence in Deity, so complete as to give colour to that charge of pantheism which is inevitably flung at all mystics who try to tell what they have known; at others, to represent rather the perfect consummation of that ‘union in separateness’ which is characteristic of all true love.