Page:Revelations of divine love (Warrack 1907).djvu/68

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INTRODUCTION

gift from, its higher nature, "the Substance") and the action of a "beastly will" (from the simple animal nature) which can will no moral good and which, "failing of love," falls into sin: whereby comes pain, with all the "travail" of good and evil in conflict during the course of restoration. But it is only when the Sense-soul (wherein the higher will must overcome the lower) is at last brought up to heaven, enriched by all the profits of tribulation, and is united to the Substance waiting there, "hid with Christ in God," that we come to the perfect knowledge of God. For that knowledge, perfect in kind though always growing, can only begin when, being in our "full powers" and "all fully holy," we come to know clearly our own united perfected Soul. This seems to be Julian's view (lvi., etc.).

Julian says elsewhere that we have in us here such a "medley" of good and evil that sometimes we hardly know of others or of ourselves wherein we stand, but that each "holy assent" that we make (by the Godly Will) to the grace and will of God, is a witness that we are of God. A witness to our sonship, it might be said; and perhaps, taking Julian's view for the time, we might think that as the Lost Son "came to himself," so the soul comes to the consciousness of the Godly Will; that as he arose and came to his Father and found Him, or rather was found by his Father, so the soul receives the healing of Christ in Mercy and the leading of the Holy Ghost in Grace; and that as at last, the