Page:Revelations of divine love (Warrack 1907).djvu/73

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THE THEME OF THE BOOK
lxvii

into the joy of the Lord. "Suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart with utmost joy.—And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there" (iv.). So at the close, when the vision was not of the Love Divine in that bending Face beneath the Crown of Thorns, but of the human love that shall spring up to meet the Divine out of the lowness of earth,—the vision of how from this body of death, as from an unsightly, shapeless, and stagnant mass of quagmire, there "sprang a full fair creature, a little Child, fully shapen and formed, agile and lively, whiter than lily; which swiftly glided up into heaven"—the spiritual shewing to the soul is this: "Suddenly thou shalt he taken from all thy pain. . . . and thou shalt come up above and thou shalt have me . . . and thou shalt be fulfilled of love and of bliss" (lxiv.). And so in that early experience of Julian's when in her love, abandoned to pity and worship, she wonld not look up to Heaven from the Cross, it was also the inward sight by the higher part of her soul of the higher part of Christ's life, that Heavenly Love that could only rejoice, that overcame her frailty of flesh unwilling to suffer, and made her choose "only Jesus in weal and in woe." "Thou art my Heaven" (xix.–lv.). "All the Trinity wrought in the Passion of Jesus Christ," though only the Son of the Virgin suffered, and in seeing this, Julian saw "the Bliss of Christ's works," "the joy that is in the blissful Trinity [by reason] of the Passion of Christ";