Of the circumstances in which the Revelations came, and of all matters connected with them, Julian gives a careful account, suggestive of great calmness and power of observation and reflection at the time, as well as of discriminating judgment and certitude afterwards. She describes the preliminary seven days' sickness, the cessation of all its pain during the earlier visions, in which she had spiritual sight of the Passion of Christ, and indeed during all the five hours' "special Shewing"; the return of her physical pain and mental distress and "dryness" of feeling when the vision closed; her falling into doubt as to whether she had not simply been delirious, her terrifying dream on the Friday night,--noting carefully that "this horrible Shewing" came in her sleep, "and so did none other"--none of the Sixteen Revelations of Love came thus. Then she tells how she was helped to overcome the dream-temptation to despair, and how on the following night another Revelation, conclusion and confirmation of all, was granted to strengthen her faith. Again her faith was assayed by a similar dream-appearance of fiends that seemed as it were to be mocking at all religion, and again she was delivered, overcoming by setting her eyes on the Cross and fastening her heart on God, and comforting her soul with speech of Christ's Passion (as she would have comforted another in like distress) and rehearsing the Faith of all the Church. It may be noted here that Julian when telling how she was given grace to awaken from the former of these troubled dreams, says, "anon all vanished away and I was brought to great rest and peace, without sickness of body or dread of conscience," and that nothing in the book gives any ground for supposing that she had less than ordinary health during the long and peaceful life wherein God "lengthened her patience." Rather it would seem that one so wholesome in mind, so happy in spirit, so wisely moderate, no doubt, in self-guidance, must have kept that general health that _she_ could not despise who speaks of God having "no disdain" to serve the body, for love of the soul, of how we are "soul and body clad in the Goodness of God," of how "God hath made waters plenteous in earth to our service and to our bodily ease,"[2] and of how Christ waiteth to minister to us His gifts of grace "unto the time that we be waxen and grown, our soul with our body and our body with our soul, either of them taking help of other, till we be brought unto stature, as nature worketh."[3] Julian mentions neither her name not her state in life; she is "the soul," the "poor" or "simple" soul that the Revelation was shewed to--"a simple creature," in herself, a mere "wretch," frail and of no account.