SAINT CATHERINE'S, BRUSSELS.

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Bearing in mind the punishments in vogue at this time—to be buried alive, for example, was the penalty due to treason, and the vintner found guilty of falsifying his wine was burned in the vat containing the adulterated liquor—the Hebrew fanatics, whose excesses we have just recounted, do not seem to have been treated with any extraordinary harshness on account of their nationality. If any Christian burgher had committed a like offence, no less severe a penalty would assuredly have been meted out to him.

The city of Brussels still contains a memorial in stone of this weird tragedy: the beautiful Sacrament Chapel which was added to the Church of Saint Gudule in 1535 was built as a shrine for three of the 'Miraculous Hosts.'[30]

But to return to Ruysbroek. His campaign in favour of orthodoxy had not promoted his temporal weal. Bloemardine, as we have seen, had friends at Court, and it was perhaps owing to their opposition that he still filled, at the age of fifty, the humble post of vicar, or as we should say, curate, of Saint Gudule's, and that, in spite of his acknowledged worth, and the great name his spiritual writings had already made for him. But in truth his dress, his manner of life, his whole bearing was not such as to commend him to the friendship of the world of wealth and fashion, often then as now the shortest road to preferment. If he were not of the people, he lived amongst them, and fared as they did. Like them he was squalid, ill-housed, half-clad, very often hungry. What time he could spare from his pastoral duties he devoted to contemplation and to writing, not in Latin, but in his own rude native tongue, some of those marvellous mystic treatises which later on gained for him world-wide renown and the title of Father of Flemish prose. Union with God and to assuage the sufferings of Christ in His poor, this was his highest ambition: fat livings and comfortable stalls were things which he never thought of. Ruysbroek, however, was not destined to remain to the end of his days an obscure curate: in the year 1343 a circumstance occurred which caused him to change the scene of his labours, and presently he was called upon to fill a more responsible and dignified position. It happened thus.

Franz Coudenberg and Jan Hinckaert, friends of Ruysbroek's, were near kinsmen, and each of them occupied a canon's stall at Saint Gudule's. They sympathised with the aspirations of the people, had, perhaps, been mixed up in one of their abortive attempts to obtain liberty, and on this or some other ground, early in the year 1343, Coudenberg was accused of treason to Duke John III., who, with a view, perhaps, to ridding the town of a dangerous agitator, offered him a tract of land in the Forest of Soignes at a place called Groenendael, which for the last forty years had been the site of a hermitage now occupied by Coudenberg's friend Lambert, a solitary whose family name is not recorded, on condition that he should build a monastery there for five brethren, of whom at least two should be priests. Perhaps the offer was one which Coudenberg was not free to refuse, perhaps it was tantamount to a sentence of exile, which included within its scope Hinckaert and Ruysbroek as well. In any case, Coudenberg did not refuse it, and when early in the following year he withdrew to Groenendael, these men went with him. It was not, however, till five years later that the new community was regularly organised and that the brethren adopted a definite rule. On the 10th of March 1349 Pierre de Clermont, Bishop of Cambrai, clothed them with the habit of canons regular of the Order of Saint Augustine, and shortly afterwards they chose Jan van Ruysbroek for their prior. Not only did he know how to maintain discipline in his own monastery, but he was able to restore order in a host of others, and so great was his influence outside the cloister that within a few years of the founding of Groenendael a whole group of new religious houses sprang up—Rouge Cloître, Corsendonck, Sept Fontaines, Bethléem, Ter Cluysen—which owed their origin to one or other of his disciples, and though they were not at first submitted to Groenendael, observed the same rule and were intimately associated with it by ties of the closest friendship: for the brethren of every one of them Ruysbroek was 'the master.'

Meanwhile he did not discontinue his literary work, and as a man of letters no less than as a theologian and a reformer, Ruysbroek deserves to be studied. Writing in prose and in the vulgar tongue, he addressed himself in the first place to the people, for the art of reading was at this time sufficiently widespread, but in what he wrote there was no tinge of grossness or sensuality. His mystical treatises breathe the spirit of the Imitation of Christ, of which indeed they may be said to be the prototype, and by reason of the loftiness of his sentiments and the purity and the beauty of the language in which they are expressed he merits to be placed in the first rank of the spiritual writers of the Middle Age. He himself used so say that he wrote under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and a story related by his biographer and disciple, Hendrick Bogaerden, goes to show that at least in his own cloister such was believed to be the case.