Dalgairns, [1] "is the hitherto almost unknown work, titled, _Sixteen
Revelations of Divine Love made to a Devout Servant of God, called
Mother Juliana, an Anchoress of Norwich_" How "one of the most
remarkable books" should be "hitherto almost unknown," may be explained
partly by the fact to which the same writer draws attention, namely,
that Mother Juliana lived and wrote at the time when a certain mystical
movement was about to bifurcate and pursue its course of development,
one branch within the Church on Catholic lines, the other outside the
Church along lines whose actual issue was Wycliffism and other kindred
forms of heterodoxy, and whose logical outcome was pantheism. Hence,
between the language of these pseudo-mystics and that of the recluse of
Norwich, "there is sometimes a coincidence ... which might deceive the
unwary." It is almost necessarily a feature of every heresy to begin by
using the language of orthodoxy in a strained and non-natural sense, and
only gradually to develop a distinctive terminology of its own; but, as
often as not, certain ambiguous expressions, formerly taken in an
orthodox sense, are abandoned by the faithful on account of their
ambiguity and are then appropriated to the expression of heterodoxy, so
that eventually by force of usage the heretical meaning comes to be the
principal and natural meaning, and any other interpretation to seem
violent and non-natural. "The few coincidences," continues Father
Dalgairns, "between Mother Juliana and Wycliffe are among the many
proofs that the same speculative view often means different things in
different systems. Both St. Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in
predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a
Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the
whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe's
Pantheistic Necessitarianism." Yet on account of the mere similarity of
expression we can well understand how in the course of time some of
Mother Juliana's utterances came to be more ill-sounding to faithful