them, professedly the fruit of her normal mind; and best of all, a good deal of analytical reflection upon the phenomena which betrays a native psychological insight not inferior to that of St. Teresa. From these sources we could gather the general sobriety and penetration of her judgment, without assuming the actual teaching of the revelations to be merely the unconscious self-projection of her own mind. But in so much as many of these revelations were professedly Divine answers to her own questions, and since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to herself and were primarily for herself, though most that was said had reference to the human soul in general. They were adapted therefore to the character and individuality of her mind; and are an index of its thoughts and workings. For her they were a matter of faith; but, as she tells us, she had no token or outward proof wherewith to convince others of their reality. Those who feel disposed, as we ourselves do, to place much confidence in the word of one so perfectly sane and genuinely holy, may draw profit from the message addressed to her need; but never can it be for them a matter of faith as in a Divine message addressed directly or indirectly to themselves. So far as these revelations are a clear and noble expression of truths already contained implicitly in our faith and reason, which it brings into more explicit consciousness and vitalizes with a new power of stimulus, they may be profitable to us all; but they must be received with due criticism and discernment as themselves subject to a higher rule of truth—namely, the teaching of the Universal Church.

But to determine, with respect to these and kindred revelations, how far they may be regarded as an expression of the recipient's own mind and latent consciousness, will need a digression which the general interest of the question must excuse.

There is a tendency in the modern philosophy of religion (for example, in Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief) to rationalize inspired revelation and to explain it as altogether kindred to the apparently magical intuitions of natural genius in non-religious matters; as the result, in other words, of a rending asunder of the veil that divides what is called "super-liminal" from "subliminal" consciousness; to find in prophecy and secret insight the effect of a flash of unconscious inference from a mass of data buried in the inscrutable darkness of our forgotten self. Together with this, there is also a levelling-up philosophy, a sort of modernized ontologism, which would attribute all natural intuition to a more immediate self-revelation on God's part than seems quite compatible with orthodoxy.

But neither of these philosophies satisfy what is vulgarly understood by "revelation," and therefore both use the word in a somewhat strained sense. For certainly the first sense of the term implies a consciousness on the part of the recipient of being spoken to, of being related through such speech to another personality, whereas the flashes and intuitions of natural genius, however they may resemble and be called "inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the "True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world," certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its instrument of expression—a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought and will of the agent.

Saints and contemplatives are wont—not without justification—to speak of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind, under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense; to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me," and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by another will.

There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual insight with which she was familiar in her daily contemplations and prayers. How far, then, her own mind may have supplied the material from which the tissues were woven, or lent the colours with which the pictures were painted, or supplied the music to which the words were set, is what we must now try to determine.

II.

Taking the terms "revelation" and "inspiration" in the unsophisticated sense which they have borne not only in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but in almost all the great ethnic religions as well, we may inquire into the different sorts and degrees of the control exercised by the presumably supernatural agents over the recipient of such influence. For clearness' sake we may first distinguish between the control of the cognitive, the volitional, and the executive faculties. For our present inquiry we may leave aside those cases where the control of the executive faculties, normally subject to the will and directed by the mind, seem to be wrested from that control by a foreign agent possessed of intelligence and volition, as, for example, in such a case as is narrated of the false prophet Balaam, or of those who at the Pentecostal outpouring spoke correctly in languages unintelligible to themselves, or of the possessed who were constrained in spite of themselves to confess Christ. In these and similar cases, not only is the action involuntary or even counter to the will, but it manifests such intelligent purpose as seemingly marks it to be the effect of an alien will and intelligence. Of this kind of control exercised by the agent over the outer actions of the patient, it may be doubted if it be ever effected except through the mediation of a suggestion addressed to the mind, in such sort that though not free, the resulting action is not wholly involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply with control exercised over the will and the understanding.

With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency towards its true, happiness and true self-realization—that this same God can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to