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she knew as little of business as of Arabic, and therefore believed that she had Divine assistance in the discharge of her duty. She did not realize that a naturally quick perception and unusually good powers of reasoning fitted her for any such task, and that she had great executive ability was shown in more than one crisis of her life. It seems hardly necessary therefore to call in the aid of the Almighty to settle up M. Guyon's estate. She was left a widow at the age of 28, with two sons and an infant daughter, born just before her husband died. Her long twelve years of domestic martyrdom were at last over, as her cruel mother-in-law informed her that they could live together no longer, and Mme. Guyon was free to depart with her children. But the depression was too severe to be removed at once, and failing to get help from others, she wrote to La Combe, begging him if the letter reached him before the Magdalen's day, to pray for her. It reached him the day before, and the prayer was answered. After nearly seven years of spiritual desolation, on July 22, 1680, the glory of God settled on her soul never more to depart. She had passed through the last of the trials which were part of her initiation into the inner mysteries of Quietism. She now enjoyed not merely a peace from God, but the God of Peace. She had attained to Unity instead of union. She wrote a beautiful little poem about this time, in which she speaks of sailing with Divine Love over a watery waste, in which the boat sinks, and every support is withdrawn from her. Finally Love himself disappears, and she is left alone in the dark. She cries out

"Be not angry-I resign

Henceforth all my will to Thine;

I consent that Thou depart,

Though Thine absence break my heart!
Go then, and forever, too,

All is right that Thou wilt do.

This was just what Love intended,

He was now no more offended;

Soon as I became a child

Love returned to me and smiled.

Nevermore shall strife betide

Twixt the Bridegroom and his Bride."

And now begins a second period in the life of Mme. Guyon. From childhood up, her spiritual nature had been in a state of preparation. One trial after another she had triumphantly passed through, and now she was to give of her spiritual wisdom to others. She settled at Gex, in the first place, in the summer of 1681, taking up her abode with

the Sisters of Charity there, and began to teach the doctrine of "sanctification" or "holiness." La Combe, theoretically her director but, in reality her pupil, preached a sermon on the subject which led at once to his being warned against heresy. But the Bishop of Geneva was keen-sighted enough to see that the objectionable teaching really came from Mme. Guyon, and she was compelled to leave Gex, and take refuge with her infant daughter and her two maids in Thonon. Although Mme. Guyon remained a member of the Roman Catholic Church and conformed to its rights and ceremonies, she had really outgrown all divisions of creed or nationality. Her principal teaching was that the will itself must be entirely subject to God. There are but two principles of life, self and God. One or the other must be the central pivot. She Iwas able to discern the interior state of those who came to her for instruction, and if they were insincere in their questions about divine things, she held her peace, and answered not a word.

After two years or more at Thonon, she and La Combe were ordered by the Bishop of Geneva to leave his diocese, and they worked their way over the Alps to Turin, but after a few months Mme. Guyon returned to France and took up her abode at Grenoble, where she wrote that beautiful little book called A Short Method of Prayer. But she was soon accused again of heresy, and had to steal away to Marseilles, where she found that the whole city was in an uproar against her on account of the little book on Prayer. She managed with great trouble to make her way to Genoa, and so on to Chambéry and Grenoble, where she met her daughter, whom she took with her to Paris, arriving there, after an absence of five years on that memorable anniversary to her, the Magdalen's day, July 22d.

This was in 1686, and Mme. Guyon was now thirty-eight years of age. She took a house in a quiet part of Paris and her two sons and her daughter lived with her. In less than a year La Combe was arrested for heresy and imprisoned for the rest of his life, some 28 years. Mme. Guyon, though at great risk, continued to write to him whenever possible. The authorities tried to drive her out of Paris, but only succeeded in getting Louis XIV to issue a lettre de cachet to confine her in the convent of Saint Marie, at a time when she was only partially recovered from a severe illness. After eight months, through the intercession of Mme. de Maintenon, she was released, and went to live with the friend who had persuaded Mme. de Maintenon to plead for her. Shortly after this, her daughter married.

Now began the most active and the most important part of Mme. Guyon's life, and the beginning of her relations with Fénélon, Archbishop of Cambray, and Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. Fénélon, like herself, was a mystic, and was guided by the inner light, though to her he owed the final teaching as to the "interior way." Mme. de Maintenon

had become a great admirer of Mme. Guyon, invited her constantly to her table, and met with her and Fénélon at the Hotels de Chevreuse and Beauvilliers where a religious coterie assembled three times a week to discuss their inward experiences. During the three or four years that the light of Mme. de Maintenon's countenance shone upon Mme. Guyon she was virtually the spiritual instructress of St. Cyr, and found herself surrounded by disciples in Paris. At St. Cyr the young ladies hung upon her words, and strained every faculty to imitate her perfections. Mysticism became the fashion, and finally the pupils of St. Cyr obeyed the mistress of the novices no longer. They neglected their duties, and indulged in prayer both seasonable and unseasonable. They had illuminations, and ecstasies, and heard voices. They stopped in the midst of their sweeping, to lean upon the broom and lose themselves in contemplation. A good housekeeper once said that she knew that her maid had experienced religion because she swept under the mats. Tried by this test, the religion of the inmates of St. Cyr was not a lasting one. Mme. de Maintenon was alarmed. "I had wished to promote intelligence," she said, "but we have made orators; devotion and we have made Quietists." She commissioned Godet, Bishop of Chartres (one of the two confessors at St. Cyr, Fénélon being the other), to demand the surrender of all Mme. Guyon's books, setting herself the example by publicly handing over to him her own copy of the Short Method. Mme. de Maintenon was nothing if not politic, and after questioning Bossuet, Bourdalone and others as to the heresy of Mme. Guyon, she concluded that it would be necessary to disown her. Mme. Guyon requested to have a commission appointed to examine and pronounce upon her life and doctrines. The point that shocked Bossuet most was Mme. Guyon's declaration that she felt herself unable to pray for any particular thing, because to do so was to fail in absolute abandonment. and disinterestedness. The commission met from time to time during some six months at the little village of Issy, where one of the commissioners resided. From there Mme. Guyon was sent to Meaux, that she might be under the immediate supervision of Bossuet, a journey that had to be performed by coach, in the most severe winter of many years. The coach was buried in snow, and she narrowly escaped with her life. Bossuet did not disdain to visit her sick bed, and to take advantage of her exhaustion. He demanded a submission, and promised a favorable certificate. He received the act of submission, but withheld the certificate for six months, after which he sent her the document, certifying that he was satisfied with her submission to the Church, of whose sacraments he authorized her to partake, and acquitting her of all implication in the heresies of Molinos.

In the meantime Fénélon had been added to the commission of three, a sweet and lovely nature, and no match in any way for the

overbearing and treacherous Bossuet. Mme. Guyon was too sincere and pure-minded to suspect any want of honor in her examiner, and not only placed in his hands all her most private papers, including her autobiography, which even Fénélon had not seen, but persuaded Fénélon to be equally confiding. The trust of both was shamefully abused and their most sacred disclosures used as weapons against them. After all, the Quietism of Fénélon was of a more moderate type than that of Mme. Guyon, who was altogether a broader and a loftier soul. Their chief technical difference seems to have lain in the possibility of attaining perfect disinterestedness, that is, were they willing to be damned for the glory of God? Mme. Guyon professed to conduct devout minds by a certain method to this point, Fénélon only maintained the possibility of realising such a love, but as Vaughan (Hours with the Mystics, II. 259), very shrewdly remarks, in any case it is a supposition which involves a very gross and external conception of Hell, and one might add, a very inadequate and low conception of God.

Mme. Guyon now began to hope for a retired life among her friends in Paris, but Bossuet, finding that she trusted him no longer, chose to call this removal a flight, and had her arrested with her maid, and confined in the castle of Vincennes. This was in December, 1695, and finally, in 1698, she was transferred to the Bastille, and placed in solitary confinement. Here her faithful maid died. After four years spent in this terrible prison, she was released in 1702, and was allowed to visit her daughter for a time, after which she was banished to Blois for the remainder of her life, happily an uneventful remainder. She taught by correspondence and conversation as far as she was able, and revealed true religion to many of those who sought her out. At last, on July 9, 1717, she passed away, at the age of sixty-nine, both Bossuet and Fénélon having preceded her.

We cannot but recognize in her one of the "great souls" of the epoch, the greatest probably of her time and nation. Many legends grew up about her miraculous powers, such as grow up about all saints, whose followers think they honor them by ascribing to them supernatural gifts, when the greatest of all gifts was the love of God in which she most truly lived and moved and had her being. At least in 1668 and 1680 she experienced that union with God of which all mystics speak. She was a woman so beautiful, so graceful, so clever, and so keen of perception, that it was no wonder that vanity was her besetting sin, and the last to be cast out of her soul as it struggled upwards to perfection. In her Short Method of Prayer she begins by declaring that all are capable of prayer, which is nothing but the application to God, and the internal exercise of love. There is nothing said about petitions, prayer is a condition, not an asking for something.

The first degree of prayer is meditation, and the first thing to learn is

that the Kingdom of God is within us. We should withdraw from the outward and concentrate upon the inward; then repeat the Lord's prayer, pondering in silence over each sentence. If we feel inclined to keep up the silence, let us not continue the prayer until that desire subsides.

The second degree of prayer is simplicity. After a time the soul finds that it is enabled to approach God with ease, and prayer becomes sweet and delightful, and the soul needs not to think of any subject. We must begin to give up our whole existence to God, losing our own will in his.

A more exalted degree of prayer is that of active contemplation. In this condition the soul enjoys a continual sense of God's presence. Silence now constitutes its whole prayer, and selfish activity becomes merged in divine activity, as the stars disappear when the sun rises. Souls in this State pray without effort, as a healthy person breathes.

The soul next passes into what may be termed infused prayer. Gently and without effort it glides into this condition (which is difficult to distinguish from the preceding one), and a state of inward silence ensues. The soul suffers itself to be, as it were, annihilated, and thereby ascends to the Highest. "We can pay due honor to God only in our own annihilation, which is no sooner accomplished than He, who never suffers a void in nature, instantly fills us with Himself."

In her book called Spiritual Torrents she uses the figure of the mountain torrents that seek to reach the sea in divers ways. "Some advance gently towards perfection, never arriving at the sea, or reaching it very late, being satisfied to lose themselves in some stronger and more rapid river, which hurries them along with itself to the sea."

And speaking afterwards of the capacity of the soul, in a passage very like one in Dante, she says that all holy souls are in a state of fullness, but not in an equal amount of fullness. "A small vessel when full, is as much filled as a large one, but it does not hold as much. These souls all have the fullness of God, but according to their capacity for receiving, and there are those whose capacity God enlarges daily. *** It is a capacity of ever growing and extending more and more in God, being able to be transformed into Him, in an ever-increasing degree, just as water joined to its source, blends with it ever more and more."

It will be readily seen in how many ways the Quietism of Mme. Guyon resembles the doctrines of theosophy, more particularly in the teaching of continuous meditation, and what Patanjali calls "meditation without a seed."

KATHARINE HILLARD.

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