inful human life going on round her, not only at
Norwich, but in England, and even in Europe; and rich with this
knowledge, to which all other lore is subordinate and for whose sake
alone it is valuable, she betook herself to prayer and meditation, and
brought all this experience into relation with God, and drew from it an
ever clearer understanding of Him and of His dealings with the souls
that His Love has created and redeemed.

It is not then so wonderful that this wise and holy woman should have
faced the problems presented by the apparent discord between the truths
of faith and the facts of human life--a discord which is felt in every
age by the observant and thoughtful, but which in our age is a
commonplace on the lips of even the most superficial. But an age takes
its tone from the many who are the children of the past, rather than
from the few who are the parents of the future. Mother Juliana's book
could hardly have been in any sense "popular" until these days of ours,
in which the particular disease of mind to which it ministers has become
epidemic.

If then these suggestions to some extent furnish an explanation of the
oblivion into which the revelations of Mother Juliana have fallen, they
also justify the following attempt to draw attention to them once more,
and to give some sort of analysis of their contents; more especially as
we have reason to believe that they are about to be re-edited by a
competent scholar and made accessible to the general public, which they
have not been since the comparative extinction of Richardson's edition
of 1877. Little is known of Mother Juliana's history outside what is
implied in her revelations; nor is it our purpose at present to go aside
in search of biographical details that will be of interest only after
their subject has become interesting. Suffice it here to say that she
was thirty at the time of her revelations, which she tells us was in
1373. Hence she was born in 1343, and is said to have been a
centenarian, in which case she must have died about 1443. She probably
belonged to the Benedictine nuns at Carrow, near Norwich, and being
called to a still stricter life, retired to a hermitage close by the
Church of St. Julian at Norwich. The details she gives about her own
sick-room exclude the idea of that stricter "reclusion" which is
popularly spoken of as "walling-up"--not of course in the mythical
sense.

With these brief indications sufficient to satisfy the cr