"He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome.”
In this quote, Julian is making the point that God did not tell us that we will never be beaten down, worn, or stressed, but that we will not be overcome. Many people believe that Christianity preaches that God will make all his followers' lives easy and prosperous when it is in fact very nearly the opposite. He never promised that we will not undergo terrible things, but he did promise that Christians are ultimately able to withstand anything the world can throw at them.
“Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”
This passage brings in the major theme of this book, divine Love, and makes it applicable to each individual human. God's love is powerful and all-encompassing, but loving God back takes a somewhat different form. Truth allows a person to "see" God (i.e., understand him to be as he is), and having Wisdom provides a different sort of insight into God and his character. Having both Truth and Wisdom necessarily engenders Love, which is the highest of all emotions, especially in the tradition of Christian mysticism.
“For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed.”
This quote, taken from the sixth chapter of the book, reveals an important theological truth: when one becomes a Christian, he is figuratively wrapped in the Goodness of God, a transformative truth that encompasses and adorns the soul in the same way the clothes do the body. Julian's quote is reminiscent of the passage in Ephesians 4 where Paul encourages the Ephesians to "put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (ESV).
