The Faith of the Millions | Page 2

question. The rest are well used in their reading to take what is familiar and to leave what is strange, so that they will find in her pages much to ponder, and but a little to pass over.
It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so remarkable a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness is perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet, owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at least of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such problems must always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of Mother Juliana was as regards the light of positive knowledge and information; yet the light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled. Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible, and this is the evil of our own day, when to be passably well-informed so taxes our time and energy as to leave us no leisure for assimilating the knowledge with which we have stuffed ourselves.
We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought us forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows no ascent to God but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of God in his own soul, and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.... The four walls of her narrow home seem to be rent and torn asunder, and not only England but Christendom appears before her view;" and he is at pains to show how both anchorites and anchoresses were much-sought after by all in trouble, temporal or spiritual, and how abundant were their opportunities of becoming acquainted with human life and its burdens, and of more than compensating, through the confidences of others, whatever defect their minds might suffer through lack of personal experience. Even still, how many a priest or nun whose experience had else been narrowed to the petty domestic interests of a small family, is, in virtue of his or her vocation, put in touch with a far larger world, or with a far more important aspect of the world, than many who mingle with its every-day trivialities, and is thus made a partaker in some sense of the deeper life and experience of society and of the Universal Church! The anchoress "did a great deal more than pray. The very dangers against which the author of her rule [3] warns her, are a proof that she had many visitors. He warns her against becoming a 'babbling' or 'gossiping' anchoress, a variety evidently well-known; a recluse whose cell was the depository of all the news from the neighbourhood at a time when newspapers did not exist." Such abuses throw light upon the legitimate use of the anchoress's position in the medi?val community.
And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next to nothing of the rather worthless physical science of those times, and hardly more of philosophy or technical theology, yet she knew no little of that busy, sad, and