Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/57

influences may also be traced, one of which likewise goes back to an earlier phase of the religious life of Holland, originating about a century before the birth of the great French theologian who found a home and an intellectual throne in Geneva. In the neighbourhood of Brussels there is a green and pleasant little valley on the eastern edge of the Bois de Soignies—peaceful still, except when invaded by the motor-car—where the mystic Ruysbroek retired, with a small company of disciples, in his sixtieth year, to write his books, and where he died, twenty-eight years afterwards, in 1381. A few years before his death the Dutchman, Gerard Groote, with some of his friends, joined Ruysbroek in his retreat at Groenendaal, and imbibed his opinions. With Gerard Groote—the founder of the Order of the Brothers of the Common Life—the mystical school of Ruysbroek was transported to the extreme north of Holland. I shall mention only two other names in connection with this spiritual succession, that of Thomas a Kempis or Thomas Hamerken, the author of the ‘‘Imitatio Christi” —for that Hamerken was the author is