The silence of this book both as to preliminary ascetic exercises and as to ultimate visions of the Absolute, might be attributed to Julian's being wholly concerned with giving, for comfort to all, that special sight of truth that came to her as the answer to her own need. She sets out not to teach methods of any kind for the gradual drawing near of man to God, but to record and shew forth a Revelation, granted once, of God's actual nearness to the soul, and for this Revelation she herself had been prepared by the "stirring" of her conscience, her love and her understanding, in a word of her _faith_, even as she was in short time to be left "neither sign nor token," but only the Revelation to hold "in faith." Moreover, the means that in general she looks to for realising God's nearness, in whatever measure or manner the revelation of it may come to any soul, is the immediate one of faith as a gift of nature and a grace from the Holy Ghost: faith leading by prayer, and effort of obedience, and teachableness of spirit, into actual experience of oneness with God. The natural and common heritage of love and faith is a theme that is dear to Julian: in her view, longing toward God is grounded in the love to Him that is native to the human heart, and this longing (painful through sin) as it is stirred by the Holy Spirit, who comes with Christ, is, in each naturally developed Christian, spontaneous and increasing;--"for the nearer we be to our bliss, the more we long after it" (xlvi., lxxii., lxxxi.). "This is the kinde [the natural] yernings of the soule by the touching of the Holy Ghost: _God of Thy goodness give me Thyself: for Thou art enow to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worshippe to Thee_." God is the first as well as the last: the soul begins as well as ends with God: begins by Nature, begins again by Mercy, and ends--yet "without end"--by Grace. Certainly on the way--the way of these three, by falling, by succour, by upraising--to the more perfect knowing of God that is the soul's Fulfilment in Heaven, there is a less immediate knowledge to be gained through experience: "_And if I aske anything that is lesse, ever me wantith_," for "It needyth us to have knoweing of the littlehede of creatures and to nowtyn all thing that is made, for to love and have God that is onmade." But this knowing of the littleness of creatures comes to Julian first of all in a sight of _the Goodness of God_; "For [to] a soule that seith the Maker of all, all that is made semith full litil." By the further beholding, indeed, of God as Maker and Preserver, that which has been rightly "noughted" as of no account, is seen to be also truly of much account. For that which was seen by the soul as so little that it seemed to be about to fall to nothing for littleness, is seen by the understanding to have "three properties":--God made it, God loveth it, God keepeth it. Thus it is known as "great and large, fair and good"; "it lasteth,