The Faith of the Millions | Page 4

that is, of self-devotion.
She is careful to tell us that while she ever continued to urge the unconditional third request, the two first passed completely out of her head in the course of years, until she was reminded of them by their simultaneous and remarkable fulfilment. "For when I was thirty years old and a half, God sent me a bodily sickness in which I lay three days and three nights; and on the fourth night I took all my rites of Holy Church, and weened not to have lived till day. And after this I lay two days and two nights, and on the third night I weened oftentimes to have passed, and so weened they that were with me.... And I understood in my reason, and by the feeling of my pains that I should die, and I assented fully with all the will of my heart, to be at God's will. Thus I endured till day, and by then, was my body dead to all feeling from the midst down." She is then raised up in a sitting position for greater ease, and her curate is sent for, as the end is supposed to be near. On arrival, he finds her speechless and with her eyes fixed upwards towards heaven, "where I trusted to come by the mercy of God." He places the crucifix before her, and bids her bend her eyes upon it. "I assented to set my eyes in the face of the crucifix if I could; and so I did; for methought I could endure longer to look straight in front of me than right up"--a touch that shows the previous upturning of the eyes to have been voluntary and not cataleptic. At this moment we seem to pass into the region of the abnormal: "After this my sight began to fail; it waxed as dark about me in the chamber as if it had been night, save in the image of the cross, wherein I beheld a common light, and I wist not how. And all that was beside the cross was ugly and fearful to me, as it had been much occupied with fiends." Then the upper part of her body becomes insensible, and the only pain left is that of weakness and breathlessness. Suddenly she is totally eased and apparently quite cured, which, however, she regards as a momentary miraculous relief, but not as a deliverance from death. In this breathing space it suddenly occurs to her to beg for the second of those three wounds which were the matter of her unconditional third request; namely, for a deepened sense and sympathetic understanding of Christ's Passion. "But in this I never desired any bodily sight, or any manner of showing from God; but such compassion as I thought that a kind soul might have with our Lord Jesus." In a word, the remembrance of her two conditional and extraordinary requests of bygone years was not in her mind at the time. "And in this, suddenly I saw the red blood trickling down from under the garland;"--and so she passes from objective to subjective vision;[4] and the first fifteen revelations follow, as she tells us later, one after another in unbroken succession, lasting in all some few hours.
"I had no grief or no dis-ease," she tells us later, "as long as the fifteen showings lasted in showing. And at the end all was close, and I saw no more; and soon I felt that I should live longer." Presently all her pains, bodily and spiritual, return in full force; and the consolation of the visions seems to her as an idle dream and delusion; and she answers to the inquiries of a Religious at her bedside, that she had been raving: "And he laughed loud and drolly. And I said: 'The cross that stood before my face, methought it bled fast.'" At which the other looked so serious and awed that she became ashamed of her own incredulity. "I believed Him truly for the time that I saw Him. And so it was then my will and my meaning to do, ever without end--but, as a fool, I let it pass out of my mind. And lo! how wretched I was," &c. Then she falls asleep and has a terrifying dream of the Evil One, of which she says: "This ugly showing was made sleeping and so was none other," whence it seems that her self-consciousness was unimpaired in the other visions; that is, she was aware at the time that they were visions, and did not confound them with reality as dreams are confounded. Then follows the sixteenth and last revelation; ending with the words: "Wit well it was no raving thou sawest to-day: but take it, and believe it, and