not complete; the way of the Saints is not "Primrosed and hung
with shade." Love, with Rolle, is no easy sentimentality: it involves
definite sacrifice in more directions than one; it demands thought,
perseverance, supernatural strength, natural strenuousness; it is not a
selfish enjoyment of a circumambient atmosphere wrapping humanity,
without responsibility or effort of its own: "Love is a _Life_."

"Love," he writes, "is a perfection of learning; virtue of prophecy;
fruit of truth; help of sacraments; establishing of wit and knowledge;
riches of pure men: life of dying men. So, how good love is. If we
suffer to be slain; if we give all that we have (down) to a beggar's
staff: if we know as much as men may know on earth, all this is naught
but ordained sorrow and torment." Then, with that sound sense, which is
not the least element in the sum of his attractiveness, he utters a
subtle warning against that all too common sin, judging one another: "If
thou wilt ask how good is he or she, ask how much he or she loves: and
that no man can tell. For I hold it folly to judge a man's heart, that
none knows save GOD."

After this it cannot be necessary to say that Rolle is a true mystic.
"Many," so he tells us in this same chapter x., "Many speak and do good,
and love not GOD." But that will not suffice his exacting demands. A man
is not "good" until his interior disposition be all filled and taken up
with pure love of GOD. And as he analyses the Christian Character, there
is a pleasant blunt directness about this holy man:--"he that says he
loves GOD and will not do what is in him to shew love, tell him that he
lies."

It is possible that the alarming list of sins of the heart, in chapter
vi., may give the heedless and even the heedful matter for grave
thought, as each one finds himself ejaculating with spontaneous
fear--"Who can tell how oft he offendeth? Cleanse thou me from my secret
faults."

Surely no one need fear that the outcome of a study of Richard Rolle
will be effeminacy. Not that that indeed is the special temptation of
the English: a chill commonplace acquiescence in a convenient, if
baseless, hope that somehow "things will come all right," is far more
likely to lead them astray than any "burning yearning to GOD with a
wonderful delight and certainty." Is not George Herbert's cry apposite
still?

"O England, full of sin, but most of sloth!"

Nor can any one argue fairly that this absorption of the my