and is only good, is the life of all that is, and doeth all that is done, and she had reasoned, as others before her had reasoned, that therefore "sin hath no substance" and "sin is no deed." But perhaps it is those that are most concerned with God in creature things, that suffer most shaking from the sight of evil. Those that seek God's Kingdom in this present world, finding "the dark places of the earth" full of the habitations of cruelty, have continually the enemy as with a sword in their bones saying within them: "Where is now thy God?" "I saw," says Julian, "that He is in all things. I beheld and considered, with a soft dread, and thought: What is sin?" (xi.). So also it is immediately after the coming of the mystical Shewing made "yet more highly": "It is I, it is I, it is I that am all," that the memory of her own experience is brought to her and she sees how in her longings after God, who is all the time so close about us, around us and within,—she had always been hindered from seeing and reaching Him fully by the darkening, disturbing power of sin. "And so I looked generally upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should have all been clean, and like to our Lord as He made us" (xxvii.). Thus came again the stirring of that old question over which "afore this time often I wondered," with "mourning and sorrow," "why the beginning of sin was not letted—for then, methought, all should have been well."
To this darkness, crying to God, the light came first
