"To know our own soul"--it behoveth us to know our own soul--our
high-nature soul, which is enclosed in God, and also our soul on the
earth which Christ-Jesus inhabits, which has in it the "medley": "we
have in us our Lord Jesus uprisen, we have in us the wretchedness and
the mischief of Adam's falling, dying" (lii.). But elsewhere Julian
gives this name "our own soul" to the Church, seeing the Church
likewise as the dwelling and working-place of Christ (lxii.). She has
been speaking of the Divine Wisdom being as it were the Mother of the
soul, and now she seems to lead us to the Church as to the Nursery
where He tends His children. "For one single person may oftentimes
be broken, but the whole Body of Holy Church was never broken, nor
ever shall be, without end. And therefore a sure thing it is, a good
and a gracious, to will meekly and mightily to be fastened to our
Mother, Holy Church, that is Christ Jesus. For the Food of Mercy that
is His dearworthy blood and precious water is plenteous to make us
fair and clean; the sweet gracious hands of our Mother be ready and
diligently about us. For He in all this working useth the office of a
kind nurse that hath not else to do but to entend about the salvation
of her child" (lxi.). Each soul is indeed the soul of a person and
most intimately knows itself in its personal experience, through which
indeed alone it can come to knowledge of others. Yet the single soul
knows itself _best_ in the souls of all the saints, in the fellowship
of the "Blessed Common," where every virtue is found, not in each, at
this time, but in _all_--not now in the perfect height nor the fairest
flowering, but at growth in that ground where each plant holds some
likeness to Christ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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