Chapter 48
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
mercy and brouglit to His bliss. Rejoicing in His sight with this sure, true hope of His merciful preservation moved me in feeling and gave me comfort so that the mourning and dread were not very painful.
Yet in all this, I saw in the showings of God that this kind of sight of Him cannot be a continuing one in this life, both for His own glory and for an increase of our endless joy. That is why the sight of Him often fails us. Immediately, we fall into our selves, and we find absolutely no feeling of anything except the contrariness that is in our selves and that which comes from the root of man's first sin, with all that follows of our own contrivance. In this we labor bitterly and are tempted with feelings of sins and pains in the many different ways, spiritual and bodily, that are known to us in this life.
Chapter 48 Of mercy and grace and their properties; and how we shall rejoice that ever we suffered woe patiently.
But our good Lord the Holy Spirit, Who is endless life dwelling in our soul, keeps us most securely, works a peace in the soul, brings it to ease by grace, brings it into agreement with God, and makes it obedient. And this is the mercy, and the way that our Lord continually leads us in, as long as we are here in this life, which is changeable.
For I saw no wrath, except on man's part, and that He forgives in us. For wrath is nothing else but a perversity, and a contrariness to peace and love. It comes either from the fading of power, or the failing of wisdom, or the failing of goodness. These failures are not in God, but are failings on our part, for by sin and misery we have in ourselves a wretched and continuing contrariness to peace and love.
He showed this many times in His lovely expression of compassion and pity. For the ground of mercy is love, and the working of mercy is our preservation in love. This was showed in such a way that I could only conceive the property
THE FOURTEENTH SHOWING
of mercy as if it were only to be found in love, that is to say, as I saw it.
Mercy is a sweet, gracious working of love, mingled with abundant pity. For mercy works by preserving us, and mercy works by turning all things to good for us. Mercy allows us, for love, to fail up to a certain point, and insofar as we fail, so far we fall, and insofar as we fall, so far we die, for we must and ought to die insofar as we fail in the sight and feeling of God, Who is our life.
Our failing is full of dread, our falling is full of shame, and our dying is full of sorrow. But still, in all this, the sweet eye of pity and love never departs from us, and the working of mercy does not cease.
For I saw the property of mercy and the property of grace, which have two ways of working in a single love. Mercy is a property full of pity, which belongs to the motherhood in tender Love. Grace is a glorious property, which belongs to the royal Lordship in the same Love. Mercy brings about preserving, suffering, bringing to life and helping, and all these come from the tenderness of Love. Grace brings about raising and rewarding, endlessly surpassing what our loving and our bitter labor deserve, as it spreads abroad and shows the noble, abundant largess of God's royal Lordship in His marvelous courtesy. This comes from the abundance of Love.
Grace transforms our failings full of dread into abundant, endless comfort; grace transforms our failings full of shame into a noble, glorious rising; grace transforms our dying full of sorrow into holy, blissful life. For I saw with complete certainty that just as our contrariness here on earth brings us pain, shame and sorrow, so grace brings us surpassing comfort, glory and bliss in heaven, to the extent that when we come up [there] and receive the sweet reward which grace has wrought for us, then we shall thank and bless our Lord, endlessly rejoicing that ever we suffered woe.
And that is a property of blessed love that we shall know in God, which we might never have known without first experiencing woe.
And when I saw all this, I ought and had to grant that the