The Faith of the Millions | Page 6

contains not only the matter of her
revelations, but also the history of all the circumstances connected with
them, as well as a certain amount of personal comment upon them,
professedly the fruit of her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of
analytical reflection upon the phenomena which betrays a native
psychological insight not inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these
sources we could gather the general sobriety and penetration of her
judgment, without assuming the actual teaching of the revelations to be
merely the unconscious self-projection of her own mind. But in so
much as many of these revelations were professedly Divine answers to
her own questions, and since the answer must ever be adapted not
merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from
its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score
alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of
the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and
write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but
not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations
were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she
says, were addressed to herself and were primarily for herself, though
most that was said had reference to the human soul in general. They
were adapted therefore to the character and individuality of her mind;
and are an index of its thoughts and workings. For her they were a
matter of faith; but, as she tells us, she had no token or outward proof
wherewith to convince others of their reality. Those who feel disposed,
as we ourselves do, to place much confidence in the word of one so
perfectly sane and genuinely holy, may draw profit from the message
addressed to her need; but never can it be for them a matter of faith as
in a Divine message addressed directly or indirectly to themselves. So
far as these revelations are a clear and noble expression of truths
already contained implicitly in our faith and reason, which it brings into
more explicit consciousness and vitalizes with a new power of stimulus,
they may be profitable to us all; but they must be received with due
criticism and discernment as themselves subject to a higher rule of
truth--namely, the teaching of the Universal Church.
But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far

they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and
latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest
of the question must excuse.
There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example,
in Mr. Balfour's _Foundations of Belief_) to rationalize inspired
revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently
magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the
result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides what
is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find in
prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious
inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our
forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up
philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all
natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than
seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.
But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by
"revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained
sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness
on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related through
such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and intuitions
of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called
"inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the
thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are
felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's solitude
with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior illuminations, though
doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the "True Light which
enlightens every man coming into this world," certainly do not fulfil the
traditional notion of revelation as understood, not only in the Christian
Church, but also in all ethnic religions. For common to antiquity is the
notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the
soul's faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its
own service and as its instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact,
quite analogous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic
control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is
simply passive under the thought and will of the agent.

Saints and contemplatives are wont--not