The doctrine of spiritual childhood is sometimes regarded as the Little Flower’s peculiar contribution to the spiritual life of the Church, yet in The Revelations of Divine Love it is fully described and practised by an English Mystic living five centuries before the Saint of Lisieux. St. Therese did not so much discover as reinstate in its true, paramount position, a truth of the spiritual life which had been obscured and almost forgotten under the weight of Renaissance Humanism and Jansenistic rigorism. For, so long as man’s life and way of looking at life were essentially God-centred and supernatural, the God whom he knew and loved and tried to serve was the God of revelation, the God who has declared himself to be our heavenly Father, and who has raised us to the adoption of sons in his only-begotten Son, Christ our Lord. Consequently a spirit of childlike love and simplicity characterised the piety of both great and small, from Doctors of the Church like S. Thomas Aquinas, S. Albert the Great, and the other theologians to whom heaven was always ‘patria’ “our father’s country”, down to “a simple creature who could no letter”, such as Mother Julian. But once man had fixed his eyes not on God but on himself, then he tended to regard his Maker not as the Father but as the Creator, the Lawgiver, the Master, the just, avenging Judge sternly demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; the God of Sinai rather than of the Gospel.