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
mediaeval community.

And so, though Mother Juliana "could no letter," though she knew next to
nothing of the rather worthless physical science of those times, and
hardly more of philosophy or technical theology, yet she knew no little
of that busy, sad, and s