Page:Revelations of divine love (Warrack 1907).djvu/72

"How might any pain be more to me than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss, and all my joy suffer?" Yet the Shewing of Pain was but the introduction to, and for a time the accompaniment of, the Revelation; the Revelation, itself, as a whole, was of Love—the Goodness or Active Love of God. So the First Shewing, as the Ground of all the rest, was a large view of this Goodness as the Ground of all Being. Although through these earlier Shewings the Saviour's bodily pain is felt by Julian so fully in "mind" that she feels it indeed as if it were bodily anguish she bore, it is in this very experience that the shewing of Joy is made to her spirit. So when in the opening of the Revelation she tells of beholding the Passion of Christ, her first unexpected word is of sudden joy from the inner sight of the Love that God is: the sight of the Trinity:—"and in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. (For where JESUS appeareth, the blessed Trinity is understood, as to my sight.)" And even as Julian finds afterwards that the Last Word of the Revelation is the same as the First: "Thou shalt not be overcome," so the opening Sight already shews her that which shall be revealed all through, for learning of "more in the same," and uplifts her heart to the fulness of joy that is shewn at the close. For she feels that this shock, as it were, of Revelation—this sudden joy of seeing Love in the midst of earth's evil, beyond and beneath and in the pain that is passing, is the entrance