distress, which was identical, both in charac- | remained to be traversed. She must learn to give up cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. In the year 1674, according to the probable calculation of Mr. Upham, she was made to enter what she terms a state of desolation, which lasted, with little intermission, for nearly seven years. All was emptiness, darkness, sorrow. She describes herself as cast down, like Nebuchadnezzar, from a throne of enjoyment, to live among the beasts. "Alas!" she exclaimed, "is it possible that this heart, formerly all on fire, should now become like ice?" The heavens were as brass, and shut out her prayers; horror and trembling took the place of tranquillity; hopelessly oppressed with guilt, she saw herself a victim destined for hell. In vain for her did the church doors open, the holy bells ring, the deep-voiced intonations of the priest arise and fall, the chanted psalm ascend, through clouds of azure wandering incense. The power and the charm of the service had departed. Of what avail was music to a burning wilderness athirst for rain? Gladly would she have had recourse to the vow, to the pilgrimage, to the penance, to any extremity of self-torture. She felt the impotence of such remedies for such anguish. She had no ear for comfort, no eye for hope, not even a voice for complaint. ter and object, with the purifying flame of purgatory. This interior purgation was designed to chastise transgression-to cleanse | away the dross of self-dependence and of worldliness-to annihilate all selfish longings after even spiritual gifts and pleasures for their own sake-and to render the soul pure and passive, a perfect sacrifice to God. The beauty of Madame Guyon had cost her tender conscience many a pang. She had wept and prayed over that secret love of display which had repeatedly induced her to mingle with the thoughtless amusements of the world. At four-and-twenty the virulence of the small-pox released her from that snare. M. Guyon was laid up with the gout. She was left when the disorder seized her to the tender mercies of her mother-in-law. That inhuman woman refused to allow any but her own physician to attend her, yet for him she would not send. The disease, unchecked, had reached its height when a medical man, passing that way, happened to call at the house. Shocked at the spectacle Madame Guyon presented, he was procceding at once to bleed her, expressing, in no measured terms, his indignation at the barbarity of such neglect. The mother-in-law would not hear of such a thing. He performed the operation in spite of her threats and invectives, leaving her almost beside herself with rage. That lancet saved the life of Madame Guyon, and disappointed the relative who had hoped to see her die. When at length she recovered, she refused to avail herself of the cosmetics generally used to conceal the ravages of the disorder. Throughout her suffering she had never uttered a murmur, or felt a fear. She had even concealed the cruelty of her mother-in-law. She said, that if God had designed her to retain her beauty, He would not have sent the scourge to remove it. Her friends expected to find her inconsolable-they heard her speak only of thankfulness and joy. Her confessor reproached her with spiritual pride. The affection of her husband was visibly diminished. Yet the heart of Madame Guyon overflowed with joy. It appeared to her, that the God to whom she longed to be wholly given up had accepted her surrender, and was removing everything that might interpose between Himself and her. The experience of Madame Guyon, hitherto, had been such as to teach her the surrender of every earthly source of gratification or ground of confidence. Yet one painful stage on the road to self-annihilation more During this period the emotional element of religion in her mind appears to have suffered an almost entire suspension. Regarding the loss of certain feelings of delight as the loss of the divine favor, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. À condition by no means uncommon in ordinary Christian experience assumed, in her case, a morbid character. Our emotions may be chilled, or kindled, in ever-varying degrees from innumerable causes. We must accustom ourselves to the habitual performance of duty, whether attended or not with feelings of a pleasurable nature. It is generally found that those powerful emotions of joy which attend, at first, the new and exalting consciousness of peace with God, subside after a while. As we grow in religious strength and knowledge, a steady principle supplies their place. We are refreshed, from time to time, by seasons of heightened joy and confidence, but we cease to be dependent upon feeling. At the same time, there is nothing in Scripture to check our desire for retaining as constantly as possible a sober gladness, for finding duty delightful, and the 'joy of the Lord" our strength. These are the truths which the one-sided and unquali fied expressions of Madame Guyon at once exaggerate and obscure. During this dark interval M. Guyon died. His widow undertook the formidable task of settling his disordered affairs. Her brother gave her no assistance; her mother-in-law harassed and hindered to her utmost; yet Madame Guyon succeeded in arranging a chaos of papers, and bringing a hopeless imbroglio of business matters into order, with an integrity and a skill which excited universal admiration. She felt it was her duty; she believed that divine assistance was vouchsafed for its discharge. Of business, she says, she knew as little as of Arabic; but she knew not what she could accomplish till she tried. Minds far more visionary than hers have evinced a still greater aptitude for practical affairs. She never imagined, like Ignatius Loyola, that the mystery of the Trinity was unfolded to the immediate gaze of her mortal eyesight, or that time, before her exalted vision, rolled away its accumulated ages, and disclosed the secrets of creation, and the marvels of the six days. She dared not to dream, with Swedenborg, that the franchise of the celestial city was already hers-its topography and its legislature-its manners and its customs, revealed for her inspection-its saints and seraphim, her familiar visitants. Yet both Loyola and Swedenborg were eminent in different ways for expertness and promptitude in action, for accurate mastery of detail, for sagacious management of mankind. Like the Knight of La Mancha, they could display an excellent judgment in every province of life, unoccupied by the illusions of their spiritual knight-errantry. The twenty-second of July, 1680, is celebrated by Madame Guyon, as the happy era of her deliverance. A letter from La Combe was the instrument of a restoration as wonderful in her eyes, as the bondage. This ecclesiastic had been first introduced by Madame Guyon into the path of mystical perfection. His name is associated with her own in the early history of the Quietist movement. He subsequently became her Director, but was always more her disciple than her guide. His admiration for her amounted to a passion. Incessant persecution and long solitary imprisonment, combined, with devotional extravagance, to cloud with insanity at last an intellect never powerful. This feeble and affectionate soul perished, the victim of Quietism, and perhaps of love. It should not be forgotten, that before the inward condition of Madame Guyon changed thus remarkably for the better, her outward circumstances had undergone a similar improvement. She lived now in her own house, with her children about her. That Sycorax, her mother-in-law, dropped gall no longer into her daily cup of life. Domestic tormentors, worse than the goblins which buffeted St. Antony, assailed her peace no more. An outer sky grown thus serene, an air thus purified, may well have contributed to chase away the night of the soul, and to give to a few words of kindly counsel from Lacombe the brightness of the day-star. Our simple-hearted enthusiast was not so absolutely indifferent as she thought herself to the changes of this transitory world. Madame Guyon had now triumphantly sustained the last of those trials, which, like the probation of the ancient mysteries, made the porch of mystical initiation a passage terrible with pain and peril. Henceforward, she is the finished Quietist; henceforward, when she relates her own experience, she describes Quietism. At times, when the children did not require her care, she would walk out into a neighboring wood, and there, under the shade of the trees, amidst the singing of the birds, she now passed as many happy hours as she had known months of sorrow. Her own language will best indicate the thoughts which occupied this peaceful retirement, and exhibit the principle there deepened and matured. She says here in her Autobiography "When I had lost all created supports, and even divine ones, I then found myself happily ne cessitated to fall into the pure divine, and to fall into it through all which seemed to remove me farther from it. In losing all the gifts with all their supports, I found the Giver. Oh, poor creatures, who pass along all your time in feeding on the gifts of God, and think therein to be most favored and happy, how I pity you if ye stop here, short of the true rest, and cease to go forward to God, through resignation of the same gifts! How many pass all their lives this way, and think highly of themselves therein! There are others who, being designed of God to die to themselves, yet pass all their time in a dying life, and in inward agonies, without ever entering into God, through death and total loss; because they are always willing to retain something under plausible pretexts, and so never lose self to the whole extent of the designs of God. Wherefore, they never enjoy God in his fulness-a loss that will not perfectly be known until another life.”—Autobiography, vol. i. p. 168. She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated action and choice. "I To her amazement and unspeakable happiness, it appeared as though all such natural movement existed no longer-a higher power had displaced and occupied its room. even perceived no more (she continues) the soul which He had formerly conducted by his rod and his staff, because now He alone appeared to me, my soul having given up its place to Him. It seemed to me as if it was wholly and altogether passed into its God, to make but one and the same thing with Him; even as a little drop of water cast into the sea receives the qualities of the sea." She speaks of herself as now practising the virtues no longer as virtues-that is, not by separate and constrained efforts. It would have required effort not to practise them. The soul thus united with God "has immanent in itself the essence of all Christian virtues and duties, which naturally and without effort, as if a man should have them without knowing that he had them, develop themselves on appropriate occasions by their own law of action."-Upham, vol. i. p. 198. Somewhat later she expresses herself in language rendered by Mr. Upham as follows: "The soul passing out of itself by dying to it self necessarily passes into its divine object. This is the law of its transition. When it passes out of self, which is limited, and therefore is not God, and consequently is evil, it necessarily passes into the unlimited and universal, which is God, and therefore is the true good. My own experience seemed to me to be a verification of this. My spirit disenthralled from selfishness, became united with and lost in God, its Sovereign, who attracted it more and more to Himself. And this was so much the case, that I could seem to see and know God only, and not myself. . . It was thus that my soul was lost in God, who communicated to it his qualities, having drawn it out of all that it had of its own. . O happy poverty, happy loss, happy nothing, which gives no less than God himself in his own immensity -no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the creation, but always drawing it out of that to plunge it wholly into his divine Essence. Then the soul knows that all the states of self-pleasing visions, of intellectual illuminations, of ecstasies and raptures, of whatever value they might once have been, are now rather obstacles than advancements; and that they are not of service in the state of experience which is far above them; because the state which has props or supports, which is the case with the merely illuminated and ecstatic state, rests in them in some degree and has pain to lose them. But the soul cannot arrive at the state of which I am now speaking, without the loss of all such supports and helps. The soul is then so submissive, and perhaps we may say so passive, that is to say, is so disposed equally to receive from the hand of God either 487 good or evil,-as is truly astonishing. It receives both the one and the other without any selfish emotions, letting them flow and be lost as they came.”—Vol. i. pp. 262, 263. These passages convey the substance of the doctrine which, illustrated and expressed in various ways, pervades all the writings of Madame Guyon. This is the principle, adorned by the fancy of her Torrents and inculcated in the practical directions of her Short Method of Prayer. Such is the state to which Quietism proposes to conduct its votaries. In some places, she qualifies the strength of her expressions-she admits that we are not at all times equally conscious of this absolute union of the soul with its centre-the lower nature may not be always insensible to distress. But the higher, the inmost element of the soul is all the while profoundly calm, and recollection presently imparts a similar repose to the inferior nature. There is a separation here similar to that described by Richard of St. Victor, and other mystics, as the parting asunder of the soul and spirit. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it, out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in " large room" (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the compass of Infinity), substantial or essential word" is spoken there. It is a continuous word, potent, inis the immediate unchecked operation of reeffable, ever uttered without language. It sident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and mysterious as the language of heaven. We border here on the almost pantheistic maxim of Eckart, that God is what he does. With Madame Guyon, the events of Providence are God, and the decisions of the sanctified judgment respecting them are nothing less than the immediate voice of God in the soul. She compares the nature thus at rest in God to a tablet on which the divine hand writes,-it must be held perfectly still, else the characters traced there will be distorted or incomplete. In her very humility she verges on the audacity which arrogates inspiration. If she, passive and helpless, really acts no more, the impulses she feels, her words, her actions, must all bear the impress of an infallible divine sanction. It is easy to see that her speech and action-always well-meant, but frequently ill-judged-were her own after all, though nothing of her own seemed left. She acknowledges that she was sometimes at a loss as to the course of duty. She was guided more than once by random passages a of the Bible and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of the sortes Virgiliana and the omens of ancient Rome. Her knowledge of scripture, the native power of her intellect, and the tenderness of her conscience, preserved her from pushing the doctrine of the inward light to its worst extreme. A few steps farther in that course and we meet with the medieval fanatics who declared themselves a manifestation of the Holy Ghost-and with the prophetic jargon and fantastic outrage of the maddest followers of George Fox. Quietist as she was, few lives have been more busy than that of Madame Guyon with the activities of an indefatigable benevolence. It was only self-originated action which she strove to annihilate. In her case, Quietism contained a reformatory principle. Genuflexions and crossings were of little value in comparison with inward abasement and crucifixion. The prayers repeated by rote in the oratory were immeasurably inferior to that Prayer of Silence she so strongly commends that prayer which, unlimited to times and seasons, unhindered by words, is a state rather than an act—a continuous sense of submission, which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul, Thy will be done." But we must not suppose that all who embraced Quietism were so far enlightened as its ardent and intrepid apostle. Mysticism was not, in reality, a phenomenon new to the priesthood. They were prepared to turn that, like everything else, to their own advantage. The artful director made the doctrine of passivity very serviceable. It was attractive to feeble minds, and out of it he forged their fetters. Their passivity must be submission to him, who was to be to them as God. As contrasted with the mysticism of St. Theresa, that of Madame Guyon appears to great advantage. She guards her readers against attempting to form any image of God. She aspires to an intellectual elevation-a spiritual intuition, above the sensuous region of theurgy, of visions, and of dreams. She saw no Jesuits in heaven bearing white banners among the heavenly throng of the redeemed. She beheld no devil, like a little negro," sitting on her breviary. She did not hear the voice of Christ like a low whistle." She did not see the Saviour in an ecstasy drawing the nail out of his hand. She felt no large white dove fluttering above her head.* But she did not spend her days *La Vida de la B. M. Theresa de Jesus, pp. 300, 302, 310, 227. Ed. 1615. in founding convents a slave to the interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a confessor of Madame Guyon. In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age, quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura about twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some part in the foundation and management of a new religious and charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her divine mission, she could not rest without endeavoring to influence the minds around her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendancy over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the attempt and the success. But the Quietist had buried nature, and to nature she would owe nothing,-these conversational powers could be, in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried in the rigor of a northern winter. marvellous exemption, long attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic as nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the celestial temple. The At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o'clock in the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of persons,-"friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows, all came, one after another, to hear what was to be said."--(Upham, vol. i. p. 357.) Her efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that city were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of real service to many who had sought peace in vain by I came an episcopal order to quit the diocese. the austerities and the routine of monastic When compelled subsequently, by the opseclusion. Meanwhile, she was active, both position she encountered, to withdraw secretat Thonon and Grenoble, in the establish- Îy from Grenoble, she was advised to take ment of hospitals. She carried on a large refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that and continually increasing correspondence. city at ten o'clock in the morning, but that In the former place, she wrote her Torrents, very afternoon all was in uproar against her, in the latter, she published her Short Me- so vigilant and implacable were her enemies. thod of Prayer, and commenced her Commentaries on the Bible. But, alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry takes the alarm, and cries, the Church is in danger. Priests who were asleep-priests who were place-hunting -priests who were pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them to observe and to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal. Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty, no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the religious community she had enriched were taught to insult her-tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and unearthly noises-her windows were broken -her letters were intercepted. Thus before a year had elapsed, she was driven from Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet, stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere bowing and beadcounting. Monstrous contumacy-said, with one voice, spiritual slaves and spiritual slaveowners-that a woman desired by her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their triumph -had it only been flesh instead of paper. She inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot-they trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the house the whole night. Then *She appears to have attributed these alarms, in several instances, to demoniacal agency.-Autobiog. vol. ii. p. 5. A colloquy of Erasmus, entitled Virgo pænitens, satirizes, amusingly enough, these hobgoblin devices, so frequently employed by the monks. In the year 1686, Madame Guyon returned to Paris, and entered the head-quarters of persecution. Rumors reached her, doubtless from beyond the Alps, of cruel measures taken against opinions similar to her own which had spread rapidly in Italy. But she knew not that all these severities originated with Louis XIV. and his Jesuit advisersthat her king, while revoking the Edict of Nantes, and dispatching his dragoons to extirpate Protestantism in France, was sending orders to D'Etrees, his ambassador at Rome, to pursue with the utmost rigor Italian Quietism-and that the monarch, who shone and smiled at Marly and Versailles, was crowding with victims the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition. At Paris, Madame Guyon became the centre of a small but illustrious circle, who listened with delight to her exposition of that Quietism to which the tender earnestness of her language and her manner lent so indescribable a charm. There were the Duke and Duchess of Beauvilliers, the Duke and Duchess of Chevreuse, the Duchess of Bethune, and the Countess of Guiche. The daughters of Colbert and of Fouquet forgot the long enmity of their fathers in a religious friendship, whose tie was yet more closely drawn by their common admiration for Madame Guyon. But letters filled with complaints against La Combe and Madame Guyon poured in upon Harlay, Archbishop of Paris. He procured the arrest of La Combe, who spent the remainder of his days in various prisons. A little calumny and a forged letter obtained from the king a lettre de cachet confining Madame Guyon to an apartment in the Convent of St. Marie. The sisters were strongly prejudiced against her, but her gentle patience won all hearts, and her fair jailers soon vied with each other in praises of their fascinating prisoner. An examination elicited nothing decidedly unfavorable. Not a stain could be detected in her character; she offered to submit all her papers and her writings to investigation. The intercession of Madame Miramion and other friends with Madame de Maintenon, procured her release after a captivity of eight months. |