We must not, however, think of Mother Juliana as shut up within four
walls of a cell, evolving all her ideas straight from her own inner
consciousness without any reference to experience. Such a barren
contemplation, tending to mental paralysis, belongs to Oriental
pessimism, whose aim is the extinction of life, mental and physical, and
reabsorption into that void whence, it is said, misfortune has brought
us forth to troublous consciousness. The Christian contemplative knows
no ascent to God but by the ladder of creatures; he goes to the book of
Nature and of human life, and to the book of Revelation, and turns and
ponders their pages, line by line and word by word, and so feeds and
fills the otherwise thin and shadowy conception of God in his own soul,
and ever pours new oil upon the flame of Divine love. Father Daigairns
writes: "Juliana is a recluse very different from the creatures of the
imagination of writers on comparative morals. So far from being cut off
from sympathy with her kind, her mind is tenderly and delicately alive
to every change in the spiritual atmosphere of England.
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