peculiarly "modern," set forth in their full strength and wrestled with
and overthrown by an unlettered recluse of the fourteenth century. In
some sense they are the doubts of all time, with perhaps just that
peculiar complexion which they assume in the light of Christianity. Yet,
owing to the modern spread of education, or rather to the indiscriminate
divulgation of ideas, these problems are now the possession of the man
in the street, whereas in former days they were exclusively the property
of minds capable--not indeed of answering the unanswerable, but at least
of knowing their own limitations and of seeing why such problems must
always exist as long as man is man. Dark as the age of Mother Juliana
was as regards the light of positive knowledge and information; yet the
light of wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and
it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled.
Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own
vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but
knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible,
and this is the evil of our own day, when to be passably well-informed
so taxes our time and energy as to leave us no leisure for assimilating
the knowledge with which we have stuffed ourselves.

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