sion, answered and said, 'Sin is behovable,[283] but
all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing
shall be well.' In this naked word _sin_ our Lord brought to my mind
generally all that is not good.... But I saw not sin; for I believe it
had no manner of substance, nor any part of being, nor might it be
known but by the pain that is caused thereof; and this pain ...
purgeth and maketh us to know ourself, and ask mercy. In these same
words ('all shall be well') I saw an high and marvellous privity hid
in God." She wondered _how_ "all shall be well," when Holy Church
teacheth us to believe that many shall be lost. But "I had no other
answer but this, 'I shall save my word in all things, and I shall make
all thing well.'" "This is the great deed that our Lord God shall do;
but what the deed shall be, and how it shall be done, there is no
creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, ne shall wit it till it is
done."

"I saw no wrath but on man's party," she says, "and that forgiveth He
in us. It is the most impossible that may be, that God should be
wroth.... Our life is all grounded and rooted in love.... Suddenly is
the soul oned to God, when it is truly peaced in itself; for in Him is
found no wrath. And thus I saw, when we be all in peace and love, we
find no contrariousness, nor no manner of letting, through that
contrariousness which is now in us; nay, our Lord God of His goodness
maketh it to us full profitable." No visions of hell were ever showed
to her. In place of the hideous details of torture which some of the
Romish visionaries describe almost with relish, Juliana merely
reports, "To me was showed none harder hell than sin."

Again and again she rings the changes on the words which the Lord said
to her, "I love thee and thou lovest Me, and our love shall never be
disparted in two." "The love wherein He made us was in Him from
without beginning; in which love," she concludes, "we have our
beginning, and all this shall be seen in God without end."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 257: The indebtedness of the fourteenth century mystics to
Eckhart is now generally recognised, at any rate in Germany; but
before Pfeiffer's work his name had been allowed to fall into most
undeserved obscurity. This was not the fault of his scholars, who, in
spite of the Papal condemnation of his writings, speak of Eckhart with
the utmost reverence, as the "great," "sublime," or "holy" master.]

[Footnote 258: "Vir ut fer