Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions, which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,” she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt, the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details, however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after life. As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the “first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he “understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he able to describe it.