"inspirations" because of their exceeding the known resources of the
thinker's own mind, yet they are consciously autochthonous; they are
felt to spring from the mind's own soil; not to break the soul's
solitude with the sense of an alien presence. Such interior
illuminations, though doubtless in a secondary sense derived from the
"True Light which enlightens every man coming into this world,"
certainly do not fulfil the traditional notion of revelation as
understood, not only in the Christian Church, but also in all ethnic
religions. For common to antiquity is the notion of some kind of
possession or seizure, some usurpation of the soul's faculties by an
external personality, divine or diabolic, for its own service and as its
instrument of expression--a phenomenon, in fact, quite analogous, if not
the same in species, with that of hypnotic control and suggestion, where
the thought and will of the subject is simply passive under the thought
and will of the agent.

Saints and contemplatives are wont--not without justification--to speak
of their lights in prayer, and of the ordinary intuitions of their mind,
under the influence of grace, as Divine utterances in a secondary sense;
to say, "God said to me," or "seemed to say to me," or "God showed me,"
and so on. But to confound these products of their own mind with
revelation is the error only of the uninstructed or the wilfully
self-deluded. Therefore, as commonly understood, "revelation" implies
the conscious control of the mind by another mind; just as its usual
correlative, "inspiration," implies the conscious control of the will by
another will.

There can be no doubt whatever but that Mother Juliana of Norwich
considered her revelations to be of this latter description, and not to
have been merely different in degree from those flashes of spiritual