The Faith of the Millions | Page 7

without justification--to speak
of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind,
under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense;
to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed
me," and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with
revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully
self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies
the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual
correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by
another will.
There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich
considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to
have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual
insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and
prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material
from which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the
pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were
set, is what we must now try to determine.
II.
Taking the terms "revelation" and "inspiration" in the unsophisticated
sense which they have borne not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition,
but in almost all the great ethnic religions as well, we may inquire into
the different sorts and degrees of the control exercised by the
presumably supernatural agents over the recipient of such influence.
For clearness' sake we may first distinguish between the control of the
cognitive, the volitional, and the executive faculties. For our present
inquiry we may leave aside those cases where the control of the
executive faculties, normally subject to the will and directed by the
mind, seem to be wrested from that control by a foreign agent
possessed of intelligence and volition, as, for example, in such a case as
is narrated of the false prophet Balaam, or of those who at the
Pentecostal outpouring spoke correctly in languages unintelligible to
themselves, or of the possessed who were constrained in spite of
themselves to confess Christ. In these and similar cases, not only is the

action involuntary or even counter to the will, but it manifests such
intelligent purpose as seemingly marks it to be the effect of an alien
will and intelligence. Of this kind of control exercised by the agent
over the outer actions of the patient, it may be doubted if it be ever
effected except through the mediation of a suggestion addressed to the
mind, in such sort that though not free, the resulting action is not
wholly involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply
with control exercised over the will and the understanding.
With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that
God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of
reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created it
not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and
self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency
towards its true, happiness and true self-realization--that this same God
can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of some
suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of virtue,
gradually modify the response of our will to certain suggestions,
making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to evil
impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of God to
dispense with this natural method of education, and, without violating
that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice), to incline the
rational appetite this way or that; not only in reference to some
suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct object
whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy or
sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a loss
to determine the object of these spiritual passions. St. Ignatius Loyola,
in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from the
current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any
suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a
criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of
thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their
emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding
thought to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might
be the work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will
directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the
work of the mind itself, whose thoughts often seem to us abrupt

through mere failure of self-observation.
Normally what is known as an "actual grace" involves both an
illustration of the mind, and an enkindling of