“I am God,” says Love, “for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love, and I am God by nature divine. And this is hers by right-wiseness of love. So that this Precious, loved of me, is learned and led by me out of herself, for she is turned to me, in me.” This process is set forth by the writer of the _Mirror_ under three chief heads: those of Liberty as the aim, the Will as the agent, and Surrender as the method of the spiritual quest. In the conception of Liberty as the supreme aim of the spiritual life we have what is perhaps the most original feature of his work: though it is a conception which is of course implicit in the New Testament. Where most contemplatives lay emphasis on the glad servitude of love, and use the symbols of wedlock to express the willing subjugation of the soul to its Divine Bridegroom, the key of this book is the idea of spiritual freedom; and that freedom as consisting in the liberation of man’s will from finite desires that it may rejoin and lose itself within the Will of the Infinite. We are to learn, it says in the first chapter, something of “the pure love, of the noble love, and of the high love of the _free_ soul; and how the Holy Ghost has His sail in his ship.” With our “inward subtle understanding”—that spiritual intuition which is the instrument of all real knowledge—we are to follow its progress from the bondage of desire to the point at which, purged of self-will, perfected in meekness and love, “noughted and abased,” it reaches the “Seventh Estate of Grace,” and participates in the perfect liberty of Pure Being, wherein “the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition in life of peace.” “Not-willing” is the secret of liberation, and lord of our true life. “And this not-willing sows in souls the Divine Seed, fulfilled of the divine will of God. This seed may never fail, but few souls dispose them to receive this seed.” Though this emancipation is only attained by the utter surrender of all personal desire and achievement, yet throughout the book the dominant note is of glad liberation, of flying, of a rapturous ascent. As we read, we seem to hear from every page “the thunder of new wings.” The free soul is “six-winged like the seraphim.” She is “the eagle that flies high: so right high and yet more high than does any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love, and she beholds above other the beauty of the sun, and the beams and the brightness of the sun. Dame Nature,” says she, “I take leave of you: Love is me nigh, that holds me free of him against all without dread. Then,” says Love, “she afraies her nought for tribulation, nor stints for consolation.”