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ker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the "True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world," certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought and will of the agent. Saints and contemplatives are wont--not 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
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