The Faith of the Millions | Page 2

a little temporary perplexity to be dispelled by
inquiry; and this only in the case of those who are sufficiently
instructed and reflective to perceive the discord in question. The rest
are well used in their reading to take what is familiar and to leave what
is strange, so that they will find in her pages much to ponder, and but a
little to pass over.
It is, however, not only to these occasional obscurities and ambiguities
that we are to ascribe the comparative oblivion into which so
remarkable a book has fallen; but also to the fact that its noteworthiness
is perhaps more evident and relative to us than to our forefathers. It
cannot but startle us to find doubts that we hastily look upon as
peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with
and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In
some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that
peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet,
owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate
divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man
in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property
of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at
least of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such
problems must always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of

Mother Juliana was as regards the light of positive knowledge and
information; yet the light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and
steadily then as now; and it is by that light alone that the shades of
unbelief can be dispelled. Of course, wisdom without knowledge must
starve or prey on its own vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of
the middle ages; but knowledge without wisdom is so much food
undigested and indigestible, and this is the evil of our own day, when to
be passably well-informed so taxes our time and energy as to leave us
no leisure for assimilating the knowledge with which we have stuffed
ourselves.
We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four
walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner
consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren
contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental
pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and
reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought us
forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows
no ascent to God but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of
Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and
ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and
fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of God in his own soul,
and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns
writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the
imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off
from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive
to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.... The four
walls of her narrow home seem to be rent and torn asunder, and not
only England but Christendom appears before her view;" and he is at
pains to show how both anchorites and anchoresses were much-sought
after by all in trouble, temporal or spiritual, and how abundant were
their opportunities of becoming acquainted with human life and its
burdens, and of more than compensating, through the confidences of
others, whatever defect their minds might suffer through lack of
personal experience. Even still, how many a priest or nun whose
experience had else been narrowed to the petty domestic interests of a
small family, is, in virtue of his or her vocation, put in touch with a far

larger world, or with a far more important aspect of the world, than
many who mingle with its every-day trivialities, and is thus made a
partaker in some sense of the deeper life and experience of society and
of the Universal Church! The anchoress "did a great deal more than
pray. The very dangers against which the author of her rule [3] warns
her, are a proof that she had many visitors. He warns her against
becoming a 'babbling' or 'gossiping' anchoress, a variety evidently
well-known; a recluse whose cell was the depository of all the news
from the neighbourhood at a time when newspapers did not exist."
Such abuses throw light upon the legitimate use of the anchoress's
position in the mediæval community.
And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next