and substance.

There is nothing to favour and everything to disfavour the notion that
Mother Juliana was an habitual visionary, or was the recipient of any
other visions, than those which she beheld in her thirty-first year; and
of these, she tells us herself, the whole sixteen took place within a
few hours. "Now have I told you of fifteen showings, ... of which
fifteen showings, the first began early in the morning about the hour of
four, ... each following the other till it was noon of the day or past,
... and after this the Good Lord showed me the sixteenth revelation on
the night following." Speaking of them all as one, she tells us: "And
from the time it was showed I desired oftentimes to wit what was in our
Lord's meaning; and fifteen years after and more I was answered in
ghostly understanding, saying thus: 'What! wouldst thou wit thy Lord's
meaning in this thing? Wit it well: Love was His meaning.'" But this
"ghostly understanding" can hardly be pressed into implying another
revelation of the evidently supernormal type.

We rather insist on this point, as indicating the habitual healthiness
of Mother Juliana's soul--a quality which is also abundantly witnessed
by the unity and coherence of the doctrine of her revelations, which
bespeaks a mind well-knit together, and at harmony with itself. The
hysterical mind is one in which large tracts of consciousness seem to
get detached from the main body, and to take the control of the subject
for the time being, giving rise to the phenomena rather foolishly called
double or multiple "personality." This is a disease proper to the
passive-minded, to those who give way to a "drifting" tendency, and
habitually suffer their whole interests to be absorbed by the strongest
sensation or emotion that presents itself. Such minds are generally
chaotic and unorganized, as is revealed in the rambling, involved,
interminably parenthetical and digressive character of their
conversation. But when, as with Mother Juliana, we find unity and
coherence, we may infer that there has been a life-long habit of active
mental control, such as excludes the supposition of an hysterical
temperament.

Perhaps the similarity of the phenomena which attend both on
extraordinary psychic weakness and passivity, and on extraordinary
energy and activity may excuse a confusion common enough, and which we
have dwelt on elsewhere. But obviously as far as the natural
consequences of a given psychic state a