The Soul is naturally that of the author. Lady Love is his instructress, and all the most beautiful passages are given to her. Reason’s rôle is interrogatory. He catechises Love sharply though respectfully, and represents the invariable attitude of common sense confronted by the claims of mysticism. Sometimes he goes too far; Love or the Soul is driven to put him in his place. “Oh, understanding of Reason!” says this soul noughted, “what thou hast of rudeness! Thou takest the shell or the chaff and leavest the kernel or the grain. Thine understanding is so low, that thou mayst not so highly reach as them behoves that well would have understanding of the Being that we speak of.” In general, however, the figure of Reason is used with great art to elucidate the hard sayings of Love. The alert intelligence of the writer notes all possible objections to his doctrine, and states and refutes them out of the mouths of his characters. “O Lady Love, what is this that you say?” says the shocked voice of Reason whenever the argument becomes paradoxical or abstruse. “Reason,” says Love to this, “I will answer for the profit of them for whom thou makest to us this piteous request. Reason,” says Love, “where be these double words that thou prayest me to discuss ... it is well asked, and I will,” says Love, “answer thee to all thy asking.” What, then, is the doctrine which these discussions put before us? It is the doctrine of the soul’s possible ascent from illusion to reality, from separateness to union with the Divine: the primal creed of all mysticism, here stated in its most extreme form, and pressed to its logical conclusion. It offers, not a chart of the way to a distant heaven of beatitude and recompense, but initiation into that state of being wherein we find our heaven here and now. “I took Jesus for my heaven,” said Julian of Norwich. So the writer of the _Mirror_: “Paradise is no other thing than God Himself ... why was the thief in Paradise anon as the soul was departed from his body?... He saw God, that is Paradise; for other thing is not Paradise than to see God. And this doth she [the soul] in sooth at all times that she is uncumbered of herself.” The super-essential and unknowable Godhead, whose nature is but partially revealed in the Blessed Trinity, is the only substance of reality, and the only satisfaction of the soul’s desire. “Though this soul had all the knowledge, love and learning that ever was given, or shall be given, of the Divine Trinity, it should be naught as in regard of that that she loves and shall love ... for there is no other God but He that none may know, which may not be known.” The history of human transcendence is the history of the soul’s transmutation to that condition of love in which it is, as the author is not afraid to say, deified; and so merged in the Reality from which it came forth, that it is no longer aware of its own separate experience but is “all one spirit with its Spouse.”