This hungry and desirous love, at once a personal passion and a cosmic force, drenches, transfigures and unites with the soul, as sunlight does the air, as fire does the iron flung into the furnace; so that the molten metal ‘changed into another glory’ is both iron and fire ‘ever distinct yet ever united’—an antique image of the Divine Union which he takes direct from a celebrated passage in St. Bernard’s works. “As much as is iron, so much is fire; and as much as is fire, so much is iron; yet the iron doth not become fire, nor the fire iron, but each retains its substance and nature. So likewise the spirit of man doth not become God, but is deified, and knows itself breadth, length, height and depth: and as far as God is God, so far the loving spirit is made one with Him in love.”[85] The iron, the air, represent our created essence; the fire, the sunlight, God’s Essence, which is added to our own—our _superessence_. The two are held in a union which, when we try to see it under the symbolism of space, appears a mingling, a self-mergence; but, when we feel it under the symbolism of personality, is a marriage in which the lover and beloved are ‘distinct yet united.’ “Then are we one being, one love, and one beatitude with God ... a joy so great and special that we cannot even think of any other joy. For then one is one’s self a Fruition of Love, and can and should want nothing beyond one’s own.”[86] It follows from all this that when the soul, coming to the Fourth State of Fruitive Love, enters into the Equilibrium which supports and penetrates the flux, it does and must reconcile the opposites which have governed the earlier stages of its career. The communion reached is with a Wholeness; the life which flows from it must be a wholeness too. Full surrender, harmonised with full actualisation of all our desires and faculties; not some thin, abstract, vertical relation alone, but an all-round expansion, a full, deep, rich giving and taking, a complete correspondence with the infinitely rich, all-demanding and all-generous God whose “love is measureless for it is Himself.” Thus Ruysbroeck teaches that love static and love dynamic must coexist for us as for Him; that the ‘eternal hunger and thirst’ of the God-demanding soul continues within its ecstatic satisfaction; because, however deeply it may love and understand, the Divine Excess will always baffle it. It is destined ‘ever to go forward within the Essence of God,’ to grow without ceasing deeper and deeper into this life, in “the eternal longing to follow after and attain Him Who is measureless.” “And we learn this truth from His sight: that all we taste, in comparison with that which remains out of our reach, is no more than a single drop of water compared with the whole sea.... We hunger for God’s Infinity, which we cannot devour, and we aspire to His Eternity, which we cannot attain.... In this storm of love, our activity is above reason and is in no wise. Love desires that which