No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the duty of confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and our blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best, wisely and truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She brings back the primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident happiness—as the one sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got this, it is because we lack the faith and common sense which sees life in a universal and disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she was inclined to worry about God’s work in the soul of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered in her reason “as it were by a friendly man,” “Take it generally! and behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to thee, for it is more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.” In those words we have a complete prescription for happiness and inward peace. All that is made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little thing the quantity of an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those sudden glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,” and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds of nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.” MYSTICISM IN MODERN FRANCE I SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS