ot very accurately, writes: "This book contains
various discourses of Christ (as it is pretended) to certain holy
women; and, written in the style of modern Quietists and Quakers,
speaks of the inner love of God, of perfection, et cetera."[12] No
manuscript of the work is known to exist, and absolutely no traces
can be discovered of the "Book of Margery Kempe," out of which it is
implied by the Printer that these beautiful thoughts and sayings are
taken.

There is nothing in the treatise itself to enable us to fix its
date. It is, perhaps, possible that the writer or recipient of these
revelations is the "Margeria filia Johannis Kempe," who, between
1284 and 1298, gave up to the prior and convent of Christ Church,
Canterbury, all her rights in a piece of land with buildings and
appurtenances, "which falls to me after the decease of my brother
John, and lies in the parish of Blessed Mary of Northgate outside
the walls of the city of Canterbury."[13] The revelations show that
she was (or had been) a woman of some wealth and social position,
who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life
prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature, the
Ancren Riwle.14 It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book
(whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was
a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia:
Juliana of Norwich. For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the
interpretation of revelation, and the key to the universal
mystery:[15]--

"Daughter, thou mayst no better please God, than to think
continually in His love."

"If thou wear the habergeon or the hair, fasting bread and water,
and if thou saidest every day a thousand Pater Nosters, thou shalt
not please Me so well as thou dost when thou art in silence, and
suffrest Me to speak in thy soul."

"Daughter, if thou knew how sweet thy love is to Me, thou wouldest
never do other thing but love Me with all thine heart."

"In nothing that thou dost or sayest, daughter, thou mayst no better
please God than believe that He loveth thee. For, if it were
possible that I might weep with thee, I would weep with thee for the
compassion that I have of thee."

And, from the midst of her celestial contemplations, rises up the
simple, poignant cry of human suffering: "Lord, for Thy great pain
have mercy on my little pain."

We are on surer ground with the treatise that follows, the Song of
Angels.[16] W