So in the Mediæval story,[8] the highest Mystical Vision, the sight of the Holy Grail, comes only to him that is pure from self, and looks on the bleeding wound that sin has left in man, and is compassionate, and gives himself to service and healing.--_Can ye_ drink _of the Cup I drank of?_--Love's Cup that is Death and Life.-- Wine of Love's joy I see thy cup Red to the trembling brim With Life outpoured, once lifted up, I drink, remembering Him.-- It is the mourners who are comforted: those that bear griefs of their own, or bear griefs of others fully, do not despair, though the mere onlooker may well despair. Thus the compassionate Julian's vision is of _Comfort_--comfort not for herself "in special," but for "the general Man"--for all her fellow-Christians. She who had long time mourned for the hurt that is come by sin to the creature, came to the sight of comfort not by turning her eyes away but by deeper compassion that found through the very wounds the healing of Love on earth, the glory of Love in Heaven. She was "filled with compassion for the Passion of Christ," and thus she saw _His joy_; so afterwards, she tells, "I was fulfilled in part with compassion of all mine even-Christians, for that well, well-beloved people that shall be saved. For God's servants, Holy Church, shall be shaken in sorrow and anguish and tribulation in this world, as men shake a cloth in the wind. And as to this our Lord answered in this manner: A great thing shall I make hereof in Heaven of endless worship and everlasting joys. Yea so far forth as this I saw: that our Lord joyeth of the tribulations of His servants, with ruth and compassion." "For He saith: _I shall wholly break you of your vain affections and of your vicious pride: and after that I shall together gather you, and make you mild and meek, clean and holy, by oneing to me_" (xxviii.). Sin is indeed "the sharpest scourge," "viler and more painful than hell, without comparison," "an horrible thing to see for the loved soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as Nature and Grace teacheth." And darkness, which overhangs the soul while here it is "meddling with any part of sin," "so that we see not clearly the Blissful Countenance of our Lord," is a lasting, life-long "natural penance" from God, the feeling of which indeed does not depart with actual sinning: "for ever the more clearly that the soul seeth this Blissful Countenance by grace of loving, the more it longeth to see it in fulness" (lxxii.). All this is in man's experience, with many other pains--pains which in individual lives have no proportionate relation to sin, though, in general, "sin is cause of pain" and "pain purgeth."--("_For I tell thee, howsoever thou do thou shalt have woe_"), (lxxvii., xxvii.). But the Comfort Revealed shews how sin, which "hath no part of being" and "could not be known but by the pain it is cause of," (sin which in this view may be compared to