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1soil of medieval Christianity, she found in the Catholic dogma of God incarnate and crucified for love of His sinful creatures a conception of the nature and relations of the spiritual world whose fertility is simply inexhaustible, comparable in some sort to those master-hypotheses of science which receive overwhelming confirmation day by day, through their success in co-ordinating previously irreconcilable tracts of experience into a harmonious unity. We can trace in these “shewings”’ the development of the love which was wakened in her own heart in response to that call from outside, by which the Church, as Christ’s herald, rouses men's souls from slumber: ‘Awake! thou that) sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten thee." Once started, the process works ` its way, light kindling love, and love thus kindled, seeking further light that it may burn yet more fiercely. The nearer she is brought to the centre of the world of spiritual realities and subjected to the influences and attractions that radiate from and converge to that point; the nearer, in other words, she comes to Him in whom all spirits live and move, from whom they proceed, to whom they return, so much the more imperatively does the affection, thus kindled to new ardours, seek to understand and explain itself by fuller ideas and xiii
2PREFACE images of the felt but unseen realities; and also the more faithfully do these representations, created, selected, or adapted under the mspiration of love, correspond practically to the truth of the spiritual world. Hence Love is the teacher, and Love is the thing taught—in both cases, Love as incarnate in Christ crucified, the revealer and the revealed ; known, and therefore better loved; loved, and therefore better known. In hers, as in the case of many saints and mysties, the process, viewed on its psychological side, seems to have been accelerated and intensified, and lifted into the plane of the preternatural, or, at least, of the abnormal. Like other acute and all-absorbing states of sensibility, divine love, when it seizes hold of the emotions, seems to bring together an independent system of images, memories and reasonings, and thus to create a sort of secondary personality, outside the normal, whose utterances are not all untruly regarded by the latter as proceeding from an external source. But the particular process by which love in its intensified form seeks self-utterance is of little moment compared with the meaning and end of that utterance. It is curious and instructive to see how, in many ways, Mother Juliana’s spirit of Cathohic-hearted love was cramped in its efforts at self-expression by xiv
3PREFACE certain current theological conceptions of the time, whose subsequent Calvinistic developments caused them, even in their more tolerable forms, to be eventually abandoned by the Church; how again and again it is thrown back upon itself, as waves from a cliff, in wild confusion, by the very force of its onrush. She knows not how to roll away the stone of a narrowly conceived predestination that would bury Christ away from the perishing masses of humanity outside the visible Church; yet her faith in the omnipotence and inventiveness of Divine Love is never shaken for a moment, and makes her prescient of kindlier views that had not yet appeared above the theological horizon. One who had entered, as she had, into the fountains of the great deep which were broken up with the piercing of Christ’s heart, who had gauged, as she, the force aud measure of the pent-up torrents of love then loosed upon the world, could not rest in views that sought to confine the deluge of redeeming mercy to this or that narrow channel, but cried out time after time against a harshness that was in truth no part of Catholic teaching, and against which the Church herself, inspired by the same spirit, has also cried out in her reprobation of every sort of Calyinism counter to “the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man." But over and above the obscurities xv PREFACE
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1soil of medieval Christianity, she found in the Catholic dogma of God incarnate and crucified for love of His sinful creatures a conception of the nature and relations of the spiritual world whose fertility is simply inexhaustible, comparable in some sort to those master-hypotheses of science which receive overwhelming confirmation day by day, through their success in co-ordinating previously irreconcilable tracts of experience into a harmonious unity. We can trace in these “shewings”’ the development of the love which was wakened in her own heart in response to that call from outside, by which the Church, as Christ’s herald, rouses men's souls from slumber: ‘Awake! thou that) sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten thee." Once started, the process works ` its way, light kindling love, and love thus kindled, seeking further light that it may burn yet more fiercely. The nearer she is brought to the centre of the world of spiritual realities and subjected to the influences and attractions that radiate from and converge to that point; the nearer, in other words, she comes to Him in whom all spirits live and move, from whom they proceed, to whom they return, so much the more imperatively does the affection, thus kindled to new ardours, seek to understand and explain itself by fuller ideas and xiii
2PREFACE images of the felt but unseen realities; and also the more faithfully do these representations, created, selected, or adapted under the mspiration of love, correspond practically to the truth of the spiritual world. Hence Love is the teacher, and Love is the thing taught—in both cases, Love as incarnate in Christ crucified, the revealer and the revealed ; known, and therefore better loved; loved, and therefore better known. In hers, as in the case of many saints and mysties, the process, viewed on its psychological side, seems to have been accelerated and intensified, and lifted into the plane of the preternatural, or, at least, of the abnormal. Like other acute and all-absorbing states of sensibility, divine love, when it seizes hold of the emotions, seems to bring together an independent system of images, memories and reasonings, and thus to create a sort of secondary personality, outside the normal, whose utterances are not all untruly regarded by the latter as proceeding from an external source. But the particular process by which love in its intensified form seeks self-utterance is of little moment compared with the meaning and end of that utterance. It is curious and instructive to see how, in many ways, Mother Juliana’s spirit of Cathohic-hearted love was cramped in its efforts at self-expression by xiv
3PREFACE certain current theological conceptions of the time, whose subsequent Calvinistic developments caused them, even in their more tolerable forms, to be eventually abandoned by the Church; how again and again it is thrown back upon itself, as waves from a cliff, in wild confusion, by the very force of its onrush. She knows not how to roll away the stone of a narrowly conceived predestination that would bury Christ away from the perishing masses of humanity outside the visible Church; yet her faith in the omnipotence and inventiveness of Divine Love is never shaken for a moment, and makes her prescient of kindlier views that had not yet appeared above the theological horizon. One who had entered, as she had, into the fountains of the great deep which were broken up with the piercing of Christ’s heart, who had gauged, as she, the force aud measure of the pent-up torrents of love then loosed upon the world, could not rest in views that sought to confine the deluge of redeeming mercy to this or that narrow channel, but cried out time after time against a harshness that was in truth no part of Catholic teaching, and against which the Church herself, inspired by the same spirit, has also cried out in her reprobation of every sort of Calyinism counter to “the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man." But over and above the obscurities xv PREFACE
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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