The Faith of the Millions | Page 3

sinful human life going on round her, not only at Norwich, but in England, and even in Europe; and rich with this knowledge, to which all other lore is subordinate and for whose sake alone it is valuable, she betook herself to prayer and meditation, and brought all this experience into relation with God, and drew from it an ever clearer understanding of Him and of His dealings with the souls that His Love has created and redeemed.
It is not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths of faith and the facts of human life--a discord which is felt in every age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours, in which the particular disease of mind to which it ministers has become epidemic.
If then these suggestions to some extent furnish an explanation of the oblivion into which the revelations of Mother Juliana have fallen, they also justify the following attempt to draw attention to them once more, and to give some sort of analysis of their contents; more especially as we have reason to believe that they are about to be re-edited by a competent scholar and made accessible to the general public, which they have not been since the comparative extinction of Richardson's edition of 1877. Little is known of Mother Juliana's history outside what is implied in her revelations; nor is it our purpose at present to go aside in search of biographical details that will be of interest only after their subject has become interesting. Suffice it here to say that she was thirty at the time of her revelations, which she tells us was in 1373. Hence she was born in 1343, and is said to have been a centenarian, in which case she must have died about 1443. She probably belonged to the Benedictine nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, and being called to a still stricter life, retired to a hermitage close by the Church of St. Julian at Norwich. The details she gives about her own sick-room exclude the idea of that stricter "reclusion" which is popularly spoken of as "walling-up"--not of course in the mythical sense.
With these brief indications sufficient to satisfy the craving of our imagination for particulars of time and place, let us turn to her own account of the circumstances of her visions, as well as of their nature. She tells us that in her life previous to 1373, she had, at some time or other, demanded three favours from God; first, a sensible appreciation of Christ's Passion in such sort as to share the grace of Mary Magdalene and others who were eye-witnesses thereof: "therefore I desired a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pain of our Saviour." And the motive of this desire was that she might "afterwards because of that showing have the more true mind of the Passion of Christ." Her aim was a deeper practical intelligence, and not the gratification of mere emotional curiosity.
This grace she plainly recognizes as extraordinary; for she says: "Other sight or showing of God asked I none, till when the soul was departed from the body." Her second request was likewise for an extraordinary grace; namely, for a bodily sickness which she and others might believe to be mortal; in which she should receive the last sacraments, and experience all the bodily pains, and all the spiritual temptations incident to the separation of soul and body. And the motive of this request was that she might be "purged by the mercy of God, and afterwards live more to the worship of God because of that sickness." In other words, she desired the grace of what we might call a "trial-death," that so she might better meet the real death when it came. Further, she adds, "this sickness I desired in my youth, that I might have it when I was thirty years old." And "these two desires were with a condition" (namely, if God should so will), "for methought this was not the common use of prayer." But the third request she proffers boldly "without any condition," since it was necessarily God's desire to grant it and to be sued for it; namely, the grace of a three-fold wound: the wound of true sorrow for sin; the wound of "kind compassion" with Christ's sufferings; and the wound of "wilful belonging to God,"