“Dying, and behold I live!” says Paul of his own attainment of supernal life in Christ. Ruysbroeck, who never strays far from the vital and heroic mysticism of the New Testament saints, can find no other language for this last crisis of the spirit—its movement from the state of _Wesen_ to that of _Overwesen_—than the language of death. The ever-moving line, though its vital character of duration continues, now seems to itself to swoon into the Point; the separate entity which has felt the flood of grace pour into it to energise its active career, and the ebb of homeward-tending love draw it back towards the One, now feels itself pouring into the Infinite Sea. Our personal activity, he says, has done all that it can: as the separate career of Christ our Pattern closed with His voluntary death, so the death of our selfhood on that apex of personality where we have stretched up so ardently toward the Father, shall close the separate career of the human soul and open the way to its new, God-driven career, its resurrection-life. “None is sure of Eternal Life unless he has died with all his own attributes wholly into God”[70]—all else falls short of the demands of supreme generosity. It is _The Book of the Sparkling Stone_ which contains Ruysbroeck’s most wonderful descriptions of the consciousness peculiar to these souls who have grown up to ‘the fulness of the stature of Christ’; and since this is surely the finest and perhaps the least known of his writings, I offer no apology for transcribing a long passage from its ninth chapter: ‘How we may become the Hidden Sons of God.’