Page:Revelations of divine love (Warrack 1907).djvu/25

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THE LADY JULIAN
xix

after more love to God and her trouble over the sight of man's sin and sorrow. She had come now, she mentions, to the age of thirty, for which she had in one of these prayers, desired to receive a greater consecration,—thinking, perhaps, of the year when the Carpenter's workshop was left by the Lord for wider ministry,—she was "thirty years old and an half." This would make her birth-date about the end of 1342, and the old Manuscript says that she "was yet in life" in 1442. Julian relates that the Fifteen consecutive "Shewings" lasted from about four o'clock till after nine of that same morning, that they were followed by only one other Shewing (given on the night of the next day), but that through later years the teaching of these Sixteen Shewings had been renewed and explained and enlarged by the more ordinary enlightenment and influences of "the same Spirit that shewed them." In this connection she speaks, in different chapters, of "fifteen years after and more," and of twenty years after, "save three months"; thus her book cannot have been finished before 1393.

Of the circumstances in which the Revelations came, and of all matters connected with them, Julian gives a careful account, suggestive of great calmness and power of observation and reflection at the time, as well as of discriminating judgment and certitude afterwards. She describes the preliminary seven days' sickness, the cessation of all its pain during the earlier visions, in