with an elevated spirit to the presence of the Lord, by means of pure faith, without image, form, or figure, but with great assurance founded in tranquillity and rest internal. These blessed and sublimated souls take no pleasure in anything of the world, but in contempt of it, in being alone, forsaken and forgotten by everybody, keeping always in their hearts a great lowliness and contempt of themselves; always humbled in the depths of their own unworthiness and vileness. In the same manner they are always quiet, serene, and even-minded, whether under extraordinary graces and favor, or under the most rigorous and bitter torments. No news makes them afraid. No success makes them glad. Tribulations never disturb them, nor the interior, continual Divine communications make them vain and conceited; they always remain full of holy and filial fear, in a wonderful peace, constancy, and serenity."1 "The Lord," he says, "has repose nowhere but in quiet souls, and in those in which the fire of tribulation and temptation hath burned up the dregs of passions, and with the bitter water of afflictions hath washed off the filthy spots of inordinate appetites; in a word, this Lord reposes only where quiet reigns and self-love is banished." "Afflict not thyself too much, and with inquietude, because these sharp martyrdoms may continue; persevere in humility, and go not out of thyself to seek aid; for all thy good consists in being silent, suffering and holding patience with rest and resignation; then wilt thou find the Divine Strength to overcome so hard a warfare. He is within thee that fighteth for thee; and He is Strength itself." "By the way of nothing thou must come to lose thyself in God (which is the last degree of perfection), and happy wilt thou be if thou canst so lose thyself. In this same shop of nothing, simplicity is made, interior and infused recollection is possessed, quiet is obtained, and the heart is cleansed from all imperfection.' 994 JOHN BLAKE. The Spiritual Guide, pp. 76-80. 21bid., p. 91. Ibid., pp. 112-113. The Spiritual Guide, p. 157. "La Bruyère left behind him a little treatise, entitled Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, now deservedly forgotten. The only thing in it worthy of its author's wit is a caricature of this doctrine of quiet and passivity, in a suposed quietistic version of the Lord's Prayer. It is supposed to be brought by a penitent to the director under whose instruction she has been trained, and whose approval of it is requested. Director-Speak, my child; your motive is praiseworthy. Director-I am attentive. Penitent O God, who art no more in Heaven than on Earth or in Hell, who art everywhere, I neither wish nor desire your name to be sanctified. You know what is suitable for us, and if You wish it to be it will be without my wishing or desiring it; whether Your Kingdom comes or not is to me indifferent. Neither do I ask that Your will be done on Earth as it is done in Heaven. It will be done in spite of my wishes, and it is for me to be resigned. Give us all our daily bread which is Your grace, or do not give it; I neither desire to have it or to be deprived of it. So if you pardon my crimes as I have pardoned those who have wronged me, so much the better. If, on the other hand, You punish me by damnation, still so much the better, since such is Your will." A COPY of the autobiography of Jeanne Marie Bouviéres de la Mothe, afterwards Mme. Guyon, lies before me, printed in Dublin in 1775, and the anonymous translator takes great credit for his liberality in being willing to publish the merits of a French saint, and a Roman Catholic at that. "Shall we utterly despise and cast away all the experience and leadings of a chosen Vessel," he asks, "because the product of a French soil and foreign clime? Because she was born in a Romish Country and bred a Papist, shall we exclude her * * from a place among the great multitude which stand before the Lamb?" Probably the psychologist would not accept all the phenomena of Jeanne's childhood as pure saintliness in the bud, but would lay many of the occurrences that set her apart from other children, to the account of physical weakness, and the sensitiveness of an overwrought nervous system. For some time after her birth the child's life trembled in the balance, and she was always delicate. At the tender age of twoand-a-half she was put under the care of the Ursuline nuns, and a year or two later she was transferred to the Benedictines. After a time she was taken home, where she was left almost entirely in the charge of servants. Before she was seven she had become "a show pupil," and delighted in wearing a miniature nun's habit, and practising all sorts. of childish austerities. While at home she was sent for one day to amuse the exiled Queen of England, who was charmed with the beauty and precocity of the child, and wanted to take her and bring her up as a maid of honor. Fortunately her father refused to let her go, and sent her back to the Ursulines, where her half-sister tenderly watched over and taught her. Her other step-sisters and brothers were not so congenial, and the brief intervals of her visits to her father's house were made miserable by their jealousies. At ten she was transferred to the Dominicans, where for the first time she happened to come across a Bible, which she pored over for many days. Her mother took more interest in her as she grew towards womanhood, and her grace, her beauty, and her wit began to be admired by all. Her father refused several offers of marriage for her before she was twelve years old, at which age she first partook of the communion, although her religious nature was not yet really developed. Her desires were fixed upon her own salvation, rather than the helping of others. to reach perfection, although she performed the outward duties of the religious life, visiting the poor, and spending much time in the study of religious books. Her faults were in the strictly French sense, the defects of her qualities. Perpetual admiration of her intellect, her beauty, and her grace, naturally made her vain, a fault increased by the attention fixed upon herself, and fostered by the outward routine of the convent, and the worldly incense of her mother's salon. The austerities she prescribed for herself made her very irritable, and when she missed seeing her cousin, De Toissi, who was considered a great saint, and who called at her father's house on his way to take up missionary work in Cochin China, she was so grieved that she cried all the rest of the day and the whole of the following night. May we be pardoned for thinking that De Toissi's sanctity could not have been the only cause for so much emotion, especially as about a year afterwards, she became very much attached to a relation of her father's, an accomplished young gentleman who wished to marry her, but her father thought him too near of kin. This disappointment had a very bad effect upon the seeds of devotion just springing up in her heart, and as she herself says in her autobiography, "I left off prayer, whereby I became cold toward God, and all my old faults revived, to which I added an excessive vanity, and I began to pass a great part of my time before a looking-glass *** This made me so inwardly vain, that I doubt whether any other ever exceeded me therein, but there was an affected modesty in my outward deportment that would have deceived the world." And she spent whole days and nights in reading romances, in which she was encouraged "by the fallacious pretext that they taught one to speak well!" Just before Jeanne was fifteen her father took his family to Paris. Here M. Guyon, a man 38 years of age, and very wealthy, sought her in marriage. Her father, without consulting her in any way, gave his consent, and this child of fifteen became the wife of a man she had seen but three times before the ceremony, and who was in every way unsuited to her, besides being decidedly her inferior intellectually. But the crowning misfortune of the marriage was the character of M. Guyon's mother, who seems to have combined the worst traits of all the objectionable mothers-in-law ever known. She was coarse, avaracious, and hardhearted, and considered the elegance and refinement of her young daughter-in-law to be an intentional reflection upon her own manners, if she could be said to have any. If Mme. Guyon spoke, she was reproved for forwardness, and roughly silenced, if she kept still, she was accused of haughtiness and pride, and was scolded from morning till night. As she was not allowed to visit, her own mother complained that she did not come to see her often enough, so that poor Jeanne was abused, not only by her husband's relations, but by her own family as well. Before she was sixteen her spirit was completely broken, and she sat in company in a stolid silence. Her husband was a martyr to gout, and before they had been married four months, he had a severe attack, through which she nursed him faithfully. He generally had two attacks a year, each lasting about six weeks, during which periods he was confined to his bed. When one thinks of the irritability that is so constantly associated with gout, one cannot help feeling that the poor girl was sorely tried. As she says herself, "great crosses overwhelm and stifle all anger at once, but a continual contrariety irritates and stirs up a sourness at the heart." Mme. Guyon herself became very ill, and was more than once at the point of death. About this time her husband met with great pecuniary losses, but she had passed through so many trials, that all love of riches had long since died out in her. She visited the poor, took care of the sick, and sought for spiritual help from every source that she could find. A lady who was an exile came to stay at her father's house, and told her that she had all the virtues of the active life, but had not yet attained the simplicity of prayer which she herself experienced. But Mme. Guyon could not understand her. She was still trying to get by her own efforts what she could only acquire by ceasing from all effort. About this time her missionary cousin, de Toissi, returned from Cochin China, and this lady and he understood one another immediately, and conversed together in a spiritual language, which she could not comprehend, although she admired it. He would fain have taught her his own method of prayer, but she was not yet prepared for it. No sooner had he left her father's house, however, than she met a very religious man of the order of St. Francis. He had intended going in another direction, but a secret power changed his design, and Mme. Guyon's father insisted on her going to see him. He had just come out of a five years' solitude, and was much confused at being addressed by two women, for ever mindful of les convenances she had taken a relative with her. For some time he did not speak, but Mme. Guyon told him in a few words all her difficulties about prayer. He presently replied: "It is, Madam, because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find him." Having said these words, he left her. The advice brought into her heart what she had been seeking so many years, or rather discovered to her what was already there, though she had not known it. Nothing now was more easy to her than prayer, and once engaged in it, hours passed away like minutes. From the hour of her interview with the Franciscan monk she was a mystic, she had exchanged the active life for the meditative. This change took place on the Magdalen's day, July 22d, 1668, when she was a little over twenty. She now bade farewell to all her old pleasures and amusements, such as they were, and settled down to a quiet life, and the care of the temporal as well as the spiritual good of those around her. She was especially absorbed in the desire to be wholly God's and by the destruction of her own will to achieve union with the Divine. It was much the same thing as the doing away with the sense of separateness, and leaning to identify the soul with God. During the year 1670, a curious incident happened. One day, when on her way to church, a mysterious stranger appeared at her side, and began to talk to her. He seemed very grave and learned, but was so poorly dressed that she took him for a beggar. He spoke to her in a wonderful manner about God and sacred things, knew all her faults and failings, and gave her to understand that God required of her the entire subjection of her nature to him, which should lead to the utmost purity and height of perfection. She never saw him again, but his words remained in her memory always. Not long after this, she returned from a short journey to find her husband ill with gout and other ailments, her little daughter dangerously ill of small-pox, and her eldest son attacked by so malignant a type of the same dreadful disease, that although he recovered, he was disfigured for life. Her father wanted to take Mme. Guyon and her youngest son to his own house, before they should catch the infection, but the terrible mother-in-law would not allow them to go. The little boy and his mother were taken ill the same day,and the child died literally for want of care. The mother-in-law would not send for a physician, and Mme. Guyon, who was frightfully ill, was only saved by the accidental visit of a clever surgeon. But her beauty was gone forever. Shortly after her recovery, she met Father La Combe, who then learned that Mme. Guyon was in possession of something he lacked. The knowledge of the "interior way," came from her to him as she had received it from the Franciscan Monk. It seemed that now she must have passed through every trial that could afflict so religious a spirit, but the worst was yet to come. She must be taught to relinquish cheerfully even spiritual pleasures. About the year 1674, she entered upon what she termed a state of desolation, which lasted with little intermission for nearly seven years. This condition of darkness and emptiness went far beyond any trials she had yet met with. "But I have experienced since," she says, "that the prayer of the heart, when it appears most dry and barren, nevertheless is not ineffectual nor offered in vain. * If the soul were faithful, to leave itself in the hand of God, it would soon arrive at the experience of the eternal truth. *** But the misfortune is, that people want to direct God, instead of resigning themselves to be directed by him." This state of desolation into which she fell, was undoubtedly in a great part a reaction from the spiritual ecstasy and emotional happiness which had preceded it. During this period of darkness and emptiness, as she expresses it, her husband died, and to her fell the task of settling up his disordered affairs, a task of which she acquitted herself to the admiration of everyone, although she says |