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ALL that we know directly of Julian of Norwich — the most
attractive, if not the greatest of the English mystics — comes
to us from her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, in which
she has set down her spiritual experiences and meditations.
Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and the author of
The Cloud of Unknowing, she lives only in her vision and her
thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to
us, but some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced,
from the study of contemporary history and art; a source of
information too often neglected by those who specialize in
religious literature, yet without which that literature can
never wholly be understood.
Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward
III, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural
to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close
of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as " unlettered," which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly
received considerable education, including some Latin, before
her Revelations were composed. Her known connection with
the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose
gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she
may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her
first religious profession at this house, which was in her time
the principal "young ladies' school" of the Norwich diocese,
and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life.
During her most impressionable years she must have seen in
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their freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art,
for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried
to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the
fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of
miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and
was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces —
the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district — and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art
which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the
pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of
iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which
Julian's mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of
these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who
wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval
mystics flourished would do well to study Julian's Revelations in their light. There they will find expressed in design
that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding
of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong
characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe
her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn
from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her
revelations become, the more closely they approximate to
the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time.
From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the
Passion — the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds,
and "rueful and wasted" face of Christ — and those of the
Blessed Virgin as a "little maiden," as "Mater Dolorosa," and
as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common
subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the
time, and the form which they took in Julian's revelations
must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory
of those artists' works.
Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion has
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also affected her; the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This
beautiful devotion was specially characteristic of English
personal religion in the late Middle Ages, and is strongly
marked in the writings of the mystics; especially Hilton and
Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymn Jesu
Dulcis Memoria, and the many vernacular imitations of it
current in Julian's day, helped in the spread of this cult; with
which was associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the physical accidents of the Passion so
constantly reflected in her visionary experience. "0 good
Jesu!" cried Rolle, "my heart thou hast bound in love of
Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it"; and he spoke not
for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the
early fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that
of personal, intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus.
"Sweet Jesu, now will I sing
To thee, a song of love longing.
Teach me, Lord, thy love song
With sweet tears ever among."
Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write:
"Jesu, well owe I to love thee
For that me showed the roode tree,
The crown of thorns, the nailes three,
The sharp spear that through-stong thee,
Jesu of love is sooth tokening
Thy head down-bowed to love-kissing,
Thine arms spread to love-clipping,
Thy side all open to love-showing."
Of such poetry as this — with which she was probably familiar
— Julian often reminds us; and sometimes her parallels with
it are close. Thus she says in her tenth Revelation: "Then
with a glad cheer our Lord looked into his side, and beheld
rejoicing. With his sweet looking he led forth the understanding of his creature by the same wound into his side
within. And then he showed a fair delectable place and large
enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace
and in love. . . . And with this our good Lord said full
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blissfully; Lo! how that I loved thee." In such passages
as this, in her highly visualized meditations on the Crown of
Thorns and the Precious Blood, and in such phrases as "I
liked none other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss
when I am there," and other ardent expressions of religious
love, she is speaking the common devotional language and
using the common devotional imagery of her own day. Hence
those merely visionary experiences with which her book opens
and which form by far the least important part of it, can be
accounted for as the result of unconscious memory, weaving
new vivid pictures from the current religious and artistic
conceptions in which she had been reared. A correspondence
has indeed been detected between the order of these fifteen "showings," and the fifteen prayers on the Passion known as
the "XV Os," which occur in the Sarum Horse. They are,
in fact, dreams of which any devout and imaginative person
of that time was capable; and need not be taken too seriously
when estimating the character of Julian's mysticism.
This, then, was the religious, artistic, and emotional environment in which she grew up; an environment to which new
sombre colour and new realization of pain had been given by
the Black Death which swept through Norfolk when she was a
child. More important, however, than any external influence,
was the part her own temperament played in her special
apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first
of an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl,
she says, she asked of God three things. The first was, that
she might have a keen realization of Christ's Passion; because
although she had great feeling of it, she desired more, and
specially a bodily sight of His pains. The second was bodily
sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means of
grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age.
The third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three
wounds, so she might be pierced with the three wounds of
contrition, compassion, and eager longing towards God. The
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first two desires she forgot for a while; but the three wounds
she prayed for continually. When she was thirty years old,
the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such
a sickness, "so hard as unto death," as she had asked; a
fact which tells us a good deal about Julian's mental make-up,
revealing her as the possessor of an extremely active "psychic
background." By the law of association we may be sure that
her illness brought back to mind the other forgotten prayer,
for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the Passion. It is
supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress, shut
in that tiny room against the south wall of St. Julian's church
at Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced.
But nothing in her own account suggests this, and the presence
of her mother and "other persons" round her sick bed is
rather against it. At the same time, a single woman of strong
religious bent is hardly likely in that period to have remained
in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of
greater seclusion and austerity at St. Julian's, which was the
property of the Carrow convent. The anchoress was often,
but not always, a professed nun; and though no reminiscences
of cloister life can be traced in Julian's writings, such a life
would account in part for the theological knowledge and
familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings
display.
Julian's account of what happened in her illness is extremely
precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting
psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373
and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given
the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite
conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of
the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the
priest came to help her agony she was already speechless;
but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could
fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This
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she could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight.
Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure
that the end had come.
With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of
the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended.
She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which
her mind was clear and her body free of pain, "as whole as
ever before or after." In this condition her old and forgotten
desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness,
had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other,
for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish,
surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting
point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that
these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical
and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour
and common sense which add so much to our delight in her,
she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for
delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that
she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as
in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides.
One is the visual or auditory hallucination — the vision seen,
the voice heard — the materials for which clearly come from
the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be
traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual
teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the
visionary's own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account
of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly
distinct. "All the blessed teaching of our Lord God," she
says, "was shown to me by three parts — that is to say, by
the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and
by ghostly sight."
The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask
for; and here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably
distrust these quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such
visionary hallucination that her revelations began. With her
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eyes still fixed on the crucifix, and apparently at the point
of death, she suddenly saw red blood running down from the
Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more feeling
of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as
the shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running
stream for St. Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate;
and so a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual
insight went side by side with the bodily vision, which was
accepted without question by Julian as a direct message
from Christ to strengthen her, "lest she be tempted of fiends
before she died"; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic sense,
we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic
world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral
sculptors reproduced. The double experience — outward
pictures of the Passion, and inward teachings of the nature
of God — continued for five hours, whilst she lay in a state of
trance which her mother mistook for death. "The first began
early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted,
showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other,
till it was nine of the day overpassed." In those five hours
Julian received the whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen "revelations of love."
When they had passed, normal consciousness returned, or,
as she says, she "fell to herself," and knew that she must live.
She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented
by evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness,
and lived to a great age. Her careful account of that illness,
and of the psychic experiences accompanying it, helps us to
understand those experiences from the psychological as well
as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are not unique;
but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to
time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in Faith and
Suggestion, has described a case which strikingly resembles
that of Julian. Here, too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell into a death-like trance, had visions
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of a religious type, and emerged cured. Her mind was far
inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience had less
beauty and significance and was of little value for other souls.
Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that
it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts
which lie behind Julian's words.
Julian's revelations have come down to us in two distinct
versions, which have both been edited for modern readers.
The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss
Warrack's delightful edition; but our earliest manuscript
of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a
hundred years after Julian's death. Another, much shorter,
is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British
Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford,
who claims — I think with good reason — that it represents
,Julian's first account of her visions, written or told while they
were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them
had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological
learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly
sets forth her chain of visions, and the " ghostly words" and
inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says,
she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and
because she saw it to be God's will. "But," she adds, "God
forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher;
for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a
woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this
that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign
Teacher." In the long version these deprecatory words are
omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher.
On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one
whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the
established anchoress; the devout woman whose special
vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual
teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty
years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardly
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taught the importance of all its details, however "misty and
indifferent" they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when
she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of
her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which
the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the "enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit," which kept
the revelation fresh in after life.
As she says herself — for her introspective powers were
remarkable — the "first beginnings" and subsequent " ghostly
teachings" at last became so merged in her understanding
that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this
in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state
which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he "understood the Being of all Beings" — even as Julian " saw
God in a Point" — but this stupendous revelation only left
him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth "unfolding within
him like a young plant," was he able to describe it.
When we compare the two versions of Julian's work, we
find many differences which remind us of this confession.
Although the whole doctrine of the long book is really implied
in the short book — for it is, in Boehme's phrase, an unfolding
of the plant from that one seed — we see that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long version only.
They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings
of Julian's unconscious mind in her trance have only provided
the raw material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the
crude beginnings of the poem. Moreover, with age her
character deepened and grew richer. She used her talent to
help other souls, and it increased. She studied, too, and found
language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express
her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book
shows theological knowledge which would put to shame most
present-day Christians, in the later work this knowledge is
much increased. Reading was part of the duty of an anchoress,
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being regarded as an essential element in the life of prayer;
and intelligent reading has clearly nourished Julian's deep
meditations on the character of God. In her there was an
almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the
emotional life, and there are few women mystics of whom
we can say this.
The question of her literary sources is an interesting one.
A careful examination of her revelations makes it plain that
even when the short version was written, she was already
acquainted with many theological conceptions; whilst the
meditations with which the long version is enriched, and its
fuller descriptions of her spiritual "Showings," reveal her as
possessing at least by middle life a considerable knowledge of
the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas
of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas
have the special colour which was given to them by Meister
Eckhart and his school; and suggest that Julian at one time
or another had come into contact with the characteristically
Dominican type of mysticism which is best known to us in
the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on sin — " I
saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part
of being" — she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart's
saying that "evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an
effect, but a defect." So, too, Eckhart's daring assertion that
sin has its place in the scheme — " Since God, in a way, also
wills that I should have committed sins, I do not wish not to
have committed them" — appears to be echoed in gentler form
in Julian's view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the scars
which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being " not wounds
but worships." Her beautiful saying that we are God's bliss," for in us He enjoyeth without end," seems like a deduction
from the Eckhartian paradox, "God needs me as much as I
need Him." She has received, perhaps from the same source,
the antique mystical notion of the soul's precession from and
return to God." The soul," said Eckhart, "is created that it
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may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain
whence it came forth." "Thus I understood," says Julian," that all His blessed children which be come out of Him by
nature shall be brought again into Him by grace"; and
again, "all kinds that He hath made to flow out of Him to
work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him."
Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the German mystics in her
doctrine of God as the "ground of the soul." "Our soul is
so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we
may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God. . . . God is nearer to us than our own soul, for
He is the ground in whom our soul standeth, and He is the
mean that keepeth the substance and the sensuality together
so that they shall never depart." So Tauler says, " A man
who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for
God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be
present with him and he will find and enjoy eternity here."
Julian's revelation was received in 1373, and the long text
as we have it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart
had died in 1329, Tauler in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck,
whose mysticism owes much on its speculative side to Eckhart's
philosophy, in 1381. The influence of their teaching spread
rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward disposition
can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed
in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid
theological teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by
way of vernacular sermons and instructions, of which Tauler's
surviving sermons are types; and it was possibly through
such instructions given in the Carrow convent that Julian
obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism,
those contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on
which the more philosophic side of her revelation seems to
depend. The parallels with her great contemporary St.
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Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund Gardner has noted,
are probably due to the fact that both women drew their ideas
from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can
also be accounted for. His Seven Cloisters, Kingdom of
God's Lovers, and Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage were all
completed before 1350, and knowledge of them would reach
East Anglia quickly, through the Flemish colony established
at Norwich. Several close correspondences with him can be
traced in Julian's work; especially her conception of God's
eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck's "hungry yet generous love of God," and the opening phrase
of her Third Revelation, "After this I saw God in a Point,"
which reminds us of the great definition in the Seven Cloisters, "That Point in which all our lives find their end." Julian
thus represents the first emergence in English literature of a
stream of tradition which is not represented in the classic
school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this
school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced;
there is little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of
contemplatives who produced the Cloud of Unknowing and its
companion works. Her true affinities are with the Christian
Platonism which St. Augustine introduced into theology, and
its developments in the works of Erigena and Eckhart. But
when we have given full weight to the effects upon her work of
oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work
only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her
speculative mind, and helped her to understand and express
her own experience; but this experience in its essence was
independent of intellectual knowledge. It was the fruit of a
deeply mystical and poetic nature, brooding on the conception of God common to mediaeval Christianity. Julian had
in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such a
nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the " ghostly
sight."
It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of
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her teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent
consciousness of God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing
reality; a conception at once philosophic and practical. For
Julian, as for the Platonists, God is the sum of the highest
spiritual values — "He is all-thing that is good to my seeming,
and all-thing that is good, it is He." Her perception of the
Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the
strongest terms. " God is kind (nature) in His being; that
is to say, that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is
the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is
kind-head," and again, "I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God
is . . . for it is His good pleasure to reign in our understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell
in our soul endlessly, us all working into Him." But this
vivid sense of Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is
closely bound up with her devotion to the person of Christ.
Her theological path, like her mystical experience, lay through
the human to the Divine, through emotional realization of
the Passion to intellectual vision of the Godhead. In the
first revelation of all we get these two aspects of truth sharply
contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown
of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced
by her other interior sight of "the Godhead seen in mine
understanding." The long version of her book elaborates
this simple intuition of the Deity into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity — always one of Julian's favourite
subjects — but the whole is really implied in the first brief
statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of
intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, "the dread and the
homeliness of God." In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity,
which was never far from her thoughts, she found the link
between these personal and impersonal apprehensions. That
half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as "Mother"
of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions, here
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takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical
intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom "All-thing hath
the Being." "For all our life is in three; in the first we
have our being, in the second we have our increasing, and in the
third we have our fulfilling; the first is nature, the second is
mercy, and the third is grace. For the first I understood that
the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep
wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the
Trinity is our Lord; and all this we have in nature and in our
substantial making. . . . All the fair working, and all the
sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated
to the Second Person . . . and all is one Love."
This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not
unique. We find it again in the Franciscan contemplative,
Angela of Foligno. But Julian's nature is richer and more
mellow, and the doctrine of love which she deduced from her
experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects
of religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism
at its best. She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant
exuberance of the religious emotionalist, yet draws from the
apprehensions of both the heart and the head all the elements
needed to feed a full spiritual life. The human element
brought in by Christianity, with all the emotional values
belonging to it — however symbolic this side of contemplation must necessarily be — redeems philosophic mysticism
from the clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine
condemned in the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic
background, the austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life,
and Love, in whom, as Julian says, we are clad more closely
than a body in its clothes, which saves mystical fervour from
its worst extravagances. Here she is and will ever be one of
the safest guides to the contemplative life.
Another special quality of Julian's teaching is its healthy,
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vigorous, affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly
condemns — and she calls them not sins, but sickness — are
sloth or lack of zest, and doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest
and hope she regards as essential factors in the life of the soul.
The Light, Life, and Love which form her ultimate definition
of triune Reality — the Mother, Brother, and Saviour, which are
her nearest images for Christ's relation with man — these are
conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L.
Stevenson called "dim, dem, and dowie." God's attitude to
man is "courteous, glad, and merry," and we do Him less
honour by solemnity than by " cheer of mirth and joy." To
her, only the good is the true, and evil is a void, a lack of the
only reality; a Platonic notion which has always been dear
to the mystics. "In this naked word Sin," says Julian, "our
Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good . . .
but I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance
nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain
it is cause of." It follows that our attention should not be
given to the avoidance or consideration of sin, but to the
understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real. "The beholding of other men's sins, it maketh as it were a
thick mist before the eyes of the soul," says Julian. Her
strongest condemnation is given to morbid pondering of past
sins and mistakes. "Right as by the courtesy of God He
forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He that we forget
our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful dreads."
This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its
inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken
too seriously. "I understood no higher stature in this life
than childhood; "and the attitude of God to our infant souls
is that of "the kindly loving Mother that witteth and knoweth
the need of her child and keepeth it full tenderly as the kind
and condition of Motherhood will."
No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this
fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the
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duty of confidence, gaiety, and hope. "Notwithstanding our
simple living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this working rejoicing; and of all
things we may please him best, wisely and truly to believe,
and to enjoy with Him and in Him." She brings back the
primitive Christian insistence on joy — confident happiness —
as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got
this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which
sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian
says, she was inclined to worry about God's work in the soul
of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered in her
reason "as it were by a friendly man," " Take it generally!
and behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to
thee, for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than
in any special thing." In those words we have a complete
prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is
made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but "a little thing the
quantity of an hazel nut" in comparison with the Divine life
that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those
sudden glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the
Beautiful, and the True. These, in her language, are "God's
courteous showings of Himself," and we are most likely to
encounter them when we take the worlds of nature and
grace "generally," and refrain from partial or egoistic
criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks,
is the true cause of human misery and unrest. "This is the
cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we
seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no
rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, and
All-good."
END