The Faith of the Millions | Page 4

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," 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