This is a high quality book of the original classic edition. <p> This is a freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. <p> Enjoy this classic work. These few paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: <p> At the moment in which he finished saying his first Mass, this vision returned to him; and he saw his mother?s spirit, delivered from Purgatory by the power of the sacrifice which he had offered, entering into Heaven?an experience originating in, and giving sharp dramatic expression to, that sense of new and sacred powers now conferred on him, which may well at such a moment have flooded the consciousness of the young priest. <p>…It was not the solitude of the forest, but the normal, active existence of a cathedral chaplain in a busy capital city which controlled his development during that long period, stretching from the very beginnings of manhood to [16] the end of middle age; and it was in fact during these years, and in the midst of incessant distractions, that he passed through the great oscillations of consciousness which mark the mystic way. <p>…He was approaching those heights of experience from which his greatest mystical works proceed; and it was in obedience to a true instinct that he went away to the silent places of the forest?as Anthony to the solitude of the desert, Francis to the ?holy mountain? of La Verna?that, undistracted by the many whom he had served so faithfully, he might open his whole consciousness to the inflow of the One, and receive in its perfection the message which it was his duty to transmit to the world, He went, says [22] Pomerius, ?not that he might hide his light; but that he might tend it better and make it shine more brightly.? <p>…Nevertheless it seems safe to say that the bulk of his works, as we now possess them, represent him as he was during the last thirty years of his life, rather than during his earlier and more active career; and that the intense certitude, the wide deep vision of the Infinite which distinguishes them, are the fruits of those long hours of profound absorption in God for which his new life found place. <p>…Two witnesses have preserved Ruysbroeck?s solemn affirmation, given first to his disciple Gerard Groot ?in great gentleness and humility,? and repeated again upon his death-bed in the presence of the whole community, that every word of his writings was thus composed under the immediate domination of an inspiring power; that ?secondary personality of a superior type,? in touch with levels of reality beyond the span of the surface consciousness, which governs the activities of the great mystics in their last phases of development.
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