There is no mention in it of any preliminary “purgative” stage, nor of any ultimate experience of ecstasy; it is simply—­if one may so put it—­a narrative of certain intimate talks with God, once granted, when, during a few hours of the writer’s life, He explained various difficulties and made clear to her certain truths.  The impression left of the nearness of God to the soul was so vivid and sustaining, that it is not possible to read the record of it, even now, across six hundred years, without feeling strangely stirred by the writer’s certainty and joy.

Her vision is of Love:  Love is its meaning, and it was shown her for Love; she sees that God is Love and that God and man are one.  “God is nearer to us than our own soul, for man is God, and God is in all.”  If we could only know ourselves, our trouble would be cleared away, but it is easier to come to the knowing of God than to know our own soul.[65] “Our passing life here that we have in our sense-soul knoweth not what our Self is,” and the cause of our disease is that we rest in little things which can never satisfy us, for “our Soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself.”  She actually saw God enfolding all things.  “For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed.”  She further had sight of all things that are made, and her description of this “Shewing” is so beautiful and characteristic that it must be given in her own words.

“In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving....  He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball.  I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought:  What may this be?  And it was answered generally thus:  It is all that is made.  I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness].  And I was answered in my understanding:  It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it.  And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.”  Later, she adds, “Well I wot that heaven and earth, and all that is made is great and large, fair and good; but the cause why it shewed so little to my sight was for that I saw it in the presence of Him that is the Maker of all things:  for to a soul that seeth the Maker of all, all that is made seemeth full little.”  “In this Little Thing,” she continues, “I saw three properties.  The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it.  But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover—­I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss:  that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me” (Revelations, pp. 10, 18).

Julian’s vision with regard to sin is of special interest.  The problem of evil has never been stated in terser or more dramatic form.