Chapter I (1)

Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I,
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires!

MADAME GUYON.

‘Do you remember,’ said Atherton to Willoughby, when he had called to see him one morning, ‘the hunt we once had after that passage in Jeremy Taylor, about Bishop Ivo’s adventure? Coleridge relates the story without saying exactly where it is, and his daughter states in a note that she had been unable to find the place in Taylor.’

‘I recollect it perfectly; and we discovered it, I think, in the first part of his sermon _On the Mercy of the Divine Judgments_. Ivo, going on an embassy for St. Louis, meets by the way a grave, sad woman, doesn’t he?—with fire in one hand, and water in the other; and when he inquires what these symbols may mean, she answers, “My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God.”

‘Well, Gower has painted her portrait for us,—Queen Quietude, he calls her: and it is to be hung up here over my chimney-piece, by the next evening we meet together.’

* * * * *

The evening came. Atherton was to read a paper on ‘Madame Guyon and the Quietist Controversy,’ and Gower was to exhibit and explain his allegorical picture.

This painting represented a female figure, simply clad in sombre garments, sitting on a fragment of rock at the summit of a high hill. On her head hung a garland, half untwined, from neglect, which had been fantastically woven of cypress, bound about with heart’s-ease. Many flowers of the heart’s-ease had dropped off, withered; some were lying unheeded in her lap. Her face was bent downward; its expression perfectly calm, and the cast of sadness it wore rather recorded a past, than betrayed a present sorrow. Her eyes were fixed pensively, and without seeming to see them, on the thin hands which lay folded on her knees. No anxious effort of thought contracted that placid brow; no eager aspiration lifted those meekly-drooping eyelids.

At her feet lay, on her right, the little brazier in which she had carried her fire, still emitting its grey curls of smoke; and, on her left, the overturned water-urn—a Fortunatus-purse of water,—from whose silver hollow an inexhaustible stream welled out, and leaping down, was lost to sight among the rocks.

Behind her lay two wastes, stretching from east to west. The vast tracts, visible from her far-seeing mountain, were faintly presented in the distance of the picture. But they were never looked upon; her back was toward them; they belonged to a past never remembered. In the east stretched level lands, covered far as the eye could reach with cold grey inundation. Here and there coal-black ridges and dots indicated the highest grounds still imperfectly submerged; and in some places clouds of steam, water-spouts, and jets of stones and mire,—even boulders of rock, hurled streaming out of the waters into the air,—betrayed the last struggles of the Fire-Kingdom with the invasion of those illimitable tides. So have her enchantments slain the Giant of Fire, and laid him to rest under a water-pall. The place of dolours and of endless burning—so populous with Sorrows—is to be a place of great waters, where the slow vacant waves of the far-glittering reaches will come and go among the channels and the pools, and not even the bittern shall be there, with his foot to print the ooze, with his wing to shadow the sleeping shallows, with his cry to declare it all a desolation.

In the western background, the saintly art of Queen Quietude has made a whole burnt-offering of the cedar shades, and flowery labyrinths, and angel-builded crystal domes of Paradise. Most fragrant holocaust that ever breathed against the sky! Those volumes of cloud along the west, through which the sun is going down with dimmed and doubtful lustre (as though his had been the hand which put the torch to such a burning)—they are heavy with spicy odours. Such sweet wonders of the Eden woodlands cannot but give out sweetness in their dying. The heavens grow dusk and slumbrous with so much incense. A dreamy faintness from the laden air weighs down the sense. It seems time to sleep—for us, for all nature, to sleep, weary of terrestrial grossness and of mortal limitation,—to sleep, that all may awake, made new; and so, transformed divinely to the first ideal, have divine existence only, and God be all and in all. For God is love, and when hope and fear are dead, then love is all.

Somewhat thus did Gower describe his picture; whereon, in truth, he had expended no little art,—such a haze of repose, and likewise of unreality, had he contrived to throw over this work of fancy; and such a tone had he given, both to the work of the fire on the one side, and to that of the water on the other. The fire did not seem a cruel fire, nor the water an inhospitable water. Golden lines of light from the sun, and rose-red reflections from clouds whose breasts were feathered with fire, rested on the heads of the waves, where the great flood lay rocking. The very ruins of Paradise,—those charred tree-trunks—those dusty river-beds—that shrivelled boskage and white grass,—did not look utterly forlorn. Some of the glassy walls still stood, shining like rubies in the sunset, and glittering at their basements and their gateways with solid falls and pools of gold and silver, where their rich adornment had run down molten to their feet. The Destroyer was the Purifier; and the waiting sigh for renewal was full of trust.

‘A better frontispiece,’ said Atherton, ‘I could not have for my poor paper. I might have been raised to a less prosaic strain, and omitted some less relevant matter, had I been able to place your picture before me while writing. For upon this question of disinterested love, and so of quietude, our mysticism now mainly turns. With Fénélon and Madame Guyon, mysticism hovers no longer on the confines of pantheism. It deals less with mere abstractions. It is less eager to have everything which is in part done away, that the perfect may come, even while we are here. It is more patient and lowly, and will oftener use common means. Its inner light is not arrogant—for submissive love is that light; and it flames forth with no pretension to special revelations and novel gospels; neither does it construct any inspired system of philosophy. It is less feverishly ecstatic, less grossly theurgic, than in the lower forms of its earlier history. Comparative health is indicated by the fact that it aspires chiefly to a state of continuous resignation,—covets less starts of transport and instantaneous transformations. It seeks, rather, a long and even reach of trustful calm, which shall welcome joy and sorrow with equal mind,—shall live in the present, moment by moment, passive and dependent on the will of the Well-Beloved.

WILLOUGHBY. With Madame Guyon, too, I think the point of the old antithesis about which the mystics have so much to say is shifted;—I mean that the contrast lies, with her, not between Finite and Infinite—the finite Affirmation, the infinite Negation,—between sign and thing signified—between mode and modelessness—mediate and immediate,—but simply between God and Self.

ATHERTON. And so mysticism grows somewhat more clear, and reduces itself to narrower compass.

GOWER. And, just as it does so, is condemned by Rome.

ATHERTON. No doubt the attempt to reach an unattainable disinterestedness was less dangerous and less unwholesome than the strain after superhuman knowledge and miraculous vision.

MRS. ATHERTON. I have just opened on one of her verses in Cowper here, which exactly expresses what Mr. Willoughby was suggesting:—

The love of Thee flows just as much
As that of ebbing self subsides;
Our hearts, their scantiness is such,
Bear not the conflict of two rival tides.

Stay; here is one I marked, which goes farther still. It is an allegorical poem. Love has bidden her embark, and then withdraws the vessel,—leaves her floating on the rushes and water-flowers, and spreads his wings for flight, heedless of her cries and prayers. At last she says,—

Be not angry; I resign
Henceforth all my will to thine:
I consent that thou depart,
Though thine absence breaks my heart;
Go then, and for ever 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:
Never strife shall more betide
’Twixt the bridegroom and his bride.

ATHERTON. Yes, this is the pure love, the holy indifference of Quietism.

WILLOUGHBY. May not this imaginary surrender of eternal happiness—or, at least, the refusal to cherish ardent anticipations of heaven, really invigorate our spiritual nature, by concentrating our religion on a _present_ salvation from sin?

ATHERTON. I think it possibly may, where contemplation of heaven is the resource of spiritual indolence or weariness in well-doing,—where the mind is prone to look forward to the better world, too much as a place of escape from the painstaking, and difficulty, and discipline of time. But where the hope of heaven is of the true sort—to put it out of sight is grievously to weaken, instead of strengthening, our position. I think we should all find, if we tried, or were unhappily forced to try, the experiment of sustaining ourselves in a religion that ignored the future, that we were lamentably enfeebled in two ways. First of all, by the loss of a support—that heart and courage which the prospect of final victory gives to every combatant; and then, secondly, by the immense drain of mental energy involved in the struggle necessary to reconcile ourselves to that loss. There can be no struggle so exhaustive as this, for it is against our nature,—not as sin has marred (so Madame Guyon thought), but as God has made it. Fearful must be the wear and tear of our religious being, in its vital functions,—and this, not to win, but to abandon an advantage. ‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’ So far from being able to dispense with it, we find in the hope of salvation, the helmet of our Christian armour. It is no height of Christian heroism, but presumption rather, to encounter, bare-headed, the onslaughts of sin and sorrow—even though the sword of the Spirit may shine naked in our right hand. But we should, at the same time, remember that our celestial citizenship is realised by _present_ heavenly-mindedness:—a height and purity of temper, however, which grows most within as we have the habit of humbly regarding that kingdom as a place prepared for us. We should not limit our foretastes of heaven to intervals of calm. We may often be growing most heavenly amid scenes most unlike heaven.

WILLOUGHBY. In persecution, for example.

ATHERTON. We should not think that we catch its glory only in happy moments of contemplation, though such musing may well have its permitted place. Let us say also that every victory over love of ease, over discontent, over the sluggish coldness of the heart, over reluctance to duty, over unkindly tempers, is in fact to us an earnest and foretaste of that heaven, where we shall actively obey with glad alacrity, where we shall be pleased in all things with all that pleases God, where glorious powers shall be gloriously developed, undeadened by any lethargy, unhindered by any painful limitation; and where that Love, which here has to contend for very life, and to do battle for its rightful enjoyments, shall possess us wholly, and rejoice and reign among all the fellowships of the blest throughout the everlasting day.

GOWER. But all this while we have been very rude. Here is Madame Guyon come to tell us her story, and we have kept her, I don’t know how long, standing at the door.

KATE. Yes, let us hear your paper first, Mr. Atherton: we can talk afterwards, you know.

So Atherton began to read.

_QUIETISM._

_Part I.—Madame Guyon._

I.

Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe was born on Easter-eve, April
13th, 1648, at Montargis. Her sickly childhood was distinguished by
precocious imitations of that religious life which was held in
honour by every one around her. She loved to be dressed in the habit
of a little nun. When little more than four years old, she longed
for martyrdom. Her school-fellows placed her on her knees on a white
cloth, flourished a sabre over her head, and told her to prepare for
the stroke. A shout of triumphant laughter followed the failure of
the child’s courage. She was neglected by her mother, and knocked
about by a spoiled brother. When not at school, she was the pet or
the victim of servants. She began to grow irritable from
ill-treatment, and insincere from fear. When ten years old, she
found a Bible in her sick room, and read it, she says, from morning
to night, committing to memory the historical parts. Some of the
writings of St. Francis de Sales, and the Life of Madame de Chantal,
fell in her way. The latter work proved a powerful stimulant. There
she read of humiliations and austerities numberless, of charities
lavished with a princely munificence, of visions enjoyed and
miracles wrought in honour of those saintly virtues, and of the
intrepidity with which the famous enthusiast wrote with a red-hot
iron on her bosom, the characters of the holy name Jesus. The girl
of twelve years old was bent on copying these achievements on her
little scale. She relieved, taught, and waited on the poor; and, for
lack of the red-hot iron or the courage, sewed on to her breast with
a large needle a piece of paper containing the name of Christ. She
even forged a letter to secure her admission to a conventual
establishment as a nun. The deceit was immediately detected; but the
attempt shows how much more favourable was the religious atmosphere
in which she grew up, to the prosperity of convents than to the
inculcation of truth.

With ripening years, religion gave place to vanity. Her handsome
person and brilliant conversational powers fitted her to shine in
society. She began to love dress, and feel jealous of rival
beauties. Like St. Theresa, at the same age, she sat up far into the
night, devouring romances. Her autobiography records her experience
of the mischievous effects of those tales of chivalry and passion.
When nearly sixteen, it was arranged that she should marry the
wealthy M. Guyon. This gentleman, whom she had seen but three days
before her marriage, was twenty-two years older than herself.

The faults she had were of no very grave description, but her
husband’s house was destined to prove for several years a pitiless
school for their correction. He lived with his mother, a vulgar
and hard-hearted woman. Her low and penurious habits were
unaffected by their wealth; and in the midst of riches, she was
happiest scolding in the kitchen about some farthing matter. She
appears to have hated Madame Guyon with all the strength of her
narrow mind. M. Guyon loved his wife after his selfish sort. If
she was ill, he was inconsolable; if any one spoke against her, he
flew into a passion; yet, at the instigation of his mother, he was
continually treating her with harshness. An artful servant girl,
who tended his gouty leg, was permitted daily to mortify and
insult his wife. Madame Guyon had been accustomed at home to
elegance and refinement,—beneath her husband’s roof she found
politeness contemned and rebuked as pride. When she spoke, she had
been listened to with attention,—now she could not open her mouth
without contradiction. She was charged with presuming to show them
how to talk, reproved for disputatious forwardness, and rudely
silenced. She could never go to see her parents without having
bitter speeches to bear on her return. They, on their part,
reproached her with unnatural indifference towards her own family
for the sake of her new connexions. The ingenious malignity of her
mother-in-law filled every day with fresh vexations. The high
spirit of the young girl was completely broken. She had already
gained a reputation for cleverness and wit—now she sat nightmared
in company, nervous, stiff, and silent, the picture of stupidity.
At every assemblage of their friends she was marked out for some
affront, and every visitor at the house was instructed in the
catalogue of her offences. Sad thoughts would come—how different
might all this have been had she been suffered to select some
other suitor! But it was too late. The brief romance of her life
was gone indeed. There was no friend into whose heart she could
pour her sorrows. Meanwhile, she was indefatigable in the
discharge of every duty,—she endeavoured by kindness, by cheerful
forbearance, by returning good for evil, to secure some kinder
treatment—she was ready to cut out her tongue that she might make
no passionate reply—she reproached herself bitterly for the tears
she could not hide. But these coarse, hard natures were not so to
be won. Her magnanimity surprised, but did not soften minds to
which it was utterly incomprehensible.[315]

Her best course would have been self-assertion and war to the very
utmost. She would have been justified in demanding her right to be
mistress in her own house—in declaring it incompatible with the
obligations binding upon either side, that a third party should be
permitted to sow dissension between a husband and his wife—in
putting her husband, finally, to the choice between his wife and his
mother. M. Guyon is the type of a large class of men. They stand
high in the eye of the world—and not altogether undeservedly—as men
of principle. But their domestic circle is the scene of cruel wrongs
from want of reflection, from a selfish, passionate
inconsiderateness. They would be shocked at the charge of an act of
barbarity towards a stranger, but they will inflict years of mental
distress on those most near to them, for want of decision,
self-control, and some conscientious estimate of what their home
duties truly involve. Had the obligations he neglected, the
wretchedness of which he was indirectly the author, been brought
fairly before the mind of M. Guyon, he would probably have
determined on the side of justice, and a domestic revolution would
have been the consequence. But Madame Guyon conceived herself bound
to suffer in silence. Looking back on those miserable days, she
traced a father’s care in the discipline she endured. Providence had
transplanted Self from a garden where it expanded under love and
praise, to a highway where every passing foot might trample it in
the dust.

A severe illness brought her more than once to the brink of the
grave. She heard of her danger with indifference, for life had no
attraction. Heavy losses befel the family—she could feel no concern.
To end her days in a hospital was even an agreeable anticipation.
Poverty and disgrace could bring no change which would not be more
tolerable than her present suffering. She laboured, with little
success, to find comfort in religious exercises. She examined
herself rigidly, confessed with frequency, strove to subdue all care
about her personal appearance, and while her maid arranged her
hair—how, she cared not—was lost in the study of Thomas à Kempis. At
length she consulted a Franciscan, a holy man, who had just emerged
from a five years’ solitude. ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘you are
disappointed and perplexed because you seek without what you have
within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will
find Him.’

II.

These words of the old Franciscan embody the response which has been
uttered in every age by the oracle of mysticism. It has its truth
and its falsehood, as men understand it. There is a legend of an
artist, who was about to carve from a piece of costly sandal-wood an
image of the Madonna; but the material was intractable—his hand
seemed to have lost its skill—he could not approach his ideal. When
about to relinquish his efforts in despair, a voice in a dream bade
him shape the figure from the oak-block which was about to feed his
hearth. He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece. This story represents
the truth which mysticism upholds when it appears as the antagonist
of superstitious externalism. The materials of religious happiness
lie, as it were, near at hand—among affections and desires which are
homely, common, and of the fireside. Let the right direction, the
heavenly influence, be received from without; and heaven is regarded
with the love of home, and home sanctified by the hope of heaven.
The far-fetched costliness of outward works—the restless, selfish
bargaining with asceticism and with priestcraft for a priceless
heaven, can never redeem and renew a soul to peace. But mysticism
has not stopped here; it takes a step farther, and that step is
false. It would seclude the soul too much from the external; and, to
free it from a snare, removes a necessary help. Like some
overshadowing tree, it hides the rising plant from the force of
storms, but it also intercepts the appointed sunshine—it protects,
but it deprives—and beneath its boughs hardy weeds have grown more
vigorously than precious grain. Removing, more or less, the
counterpoise of the letter, in its zeal for the spirit, it promotes
an intense and morbid self-consciousness. Roger North tells us that
when he and his brother stood on the top of the Monument, it was
difficult for them to persuade themselves that their weight would
not throw down the building. The dizzy elevation of the mystic
produces sometimes a similar overweaning sense of personality.

Often instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the
common laws of life, the mystic becomes the sport of the idlest
phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reaction. The excited
and overwrought temperament mistakes every vibration of the fevered
nerves for a manifestation from without; as in the solitude, the
silence, and the glare of a great desert, travellers have seemed to
hear distinctly the church bells of their native village. In such
cases an extreme susceptibility of the organ, induced by
peculiarities of climate, gives to a mere conception or memory the
power of an actual sound; and, in a similar way, the mystic has
often both tempted and enraptured himself—his own breath has made
both the ‘airs from heaven,’ and the ‘blasts from hell;’ and the
attempt to annihilate Self has ended at last in leaving nothing but
Self behind. When the tide of enthusiasm has ebbed, and the channel
has become dry, simply because humanity cannot long endure a strain
so excessive, then that magician and master of legerdemain, the
Fancy, is summoned to recal, to eke out, or to interpret the
mystical experience; then that fantastic acrobat, Affectation, is
admitted to play its tricks—just as, when the waters of the Nile are
withdrawn, the canals of Cairo are made the stage on which the
jugglers exhibit their feats of skill to the crowds on either bank.

III.

To return to Madame Guyon. From the hour of that interview with the
Franciscan she was a mystic. The secret of the interior life flashed
upon her in a moment. She had been starving in the midst of fulness;
God was near, not far off; the kingdom of heaven was within her. The
love of God took possession of her soul with an inexpressible
happiness. Beyond question, her heart apprehended, in that joy, the
great truth that God is love—that He is more ready to forgive, than
we to ask forgiveness—that He is not an austere being whose regard
is to be purchased by rich gifts, tears, and penance. This
emancipating, sanctifying belief became the foundation of her
religion. She raised on this basis of true spirituality a mystical
superstructure, in which there was some hay and stubble, but the
corner stone had first been rightly laid, never to be removed from
its place.

Prayer, which had before been so difficult, was now delightful and
indispensable; hours passed away like moments—she could scarcely
cease from praying. Her trials seemed great no longer; her inward
joy consumed, like a fire, the reluctance, the murmur, and the
sorrow, which had their birth in self. A spirit of confiding peace,
a sense of rejoicing possession, pervaded all her days. God was
continually present with her, and she seemed completely yielded up
to God. She appeared to feel herself, and to behold all creatures,
as immersed in the gracious omnipresence of the Most High. In her
adoring contemplation of the Divine presence, she found herself
frequently unable to employ any words, or to pray for any particular
blessings.[316] She was then little more than twenty years of age.
The ardour of her devotion would not suffer her to rest even here.
It appeared to her that self was not yet sufficiently suppressed.
There were some things she chose as pleasant, other things she
avoided as painful. She was possessed with the notion that every
choice which can be referred to self is selfish, and therefore
criminal.

On this principle, Æsop’s traveller, who gathered his cloak about
him in the storm, and relinquished it in the sunshine, should be
stigmatized as a selfish man, because he thought only of his own
comfort, and did not remember at the moment his family, his country,
or his Maker. It is not regard for self which makes us selfish, but
regard for self to the exclusion of due regard for others. But the
zeal of Madame Guyon blinded her to distinctions such as these. She
became filled with an insatiable desire of suffering.[317] She
resolved to force herself to what she disliked, and deny herself
what was gratifying, that the mortified senses might at last have no
choice whatever. She displayed the most extraordinary power of will
in her efforts to annihilate her will. Every day she took the
discipline with scourges pointed with iron. She tore her flesh with
brambles, thorns, and nettles. Her rest was almost destroyed by the
pain she endured. She was in very delicate health, continually
falling ill, and could eat scarcely anything. Yet she forced herself
to eat what was most nauseous to her; she often kept wormwood in her
mouth, and put coloquintida in her food, and when she walked she
placed stones in her shoes. If a tooth ached she would bear it
without seeking a remedy; when it ached no longer, she would go and
have it extracted. She imitated Madame Chantal in dressing the sores
of the poor, and ministering to the wants of the sick. On one
occasion she found that she could not seek the indulgence offered by
her Church for remitting some of the pains of purgatory. At that
time she felt no doubt concerning the power of the priest to grant
such absolution, but she thought it wrong to desire to escape any
suffering. She was afraid of resembling those mercenary souls, who
are afraid not so much of displeasing God, as of the penalties
attached to sin. She was too much in earnest for visionary
sentimentalism. Her efforts manifest a serious practical endeavour
after that absolute disinterestedness which she erroneously thought
both attainable and enjoined. She was far from attaching any
expiatory value to these acts of voluntary mortification, they were
a means to an end. When she believed that end attained, in the
entire death of self, she relinquished them.

IV.

Situated as Madame Guyon was now, her mind had no resource but to
collapse upon itself, and the feelings so painfully pent up became
proportionately vehement. She found a friend in one Mère Granger;
but her she could see seldom, mostly by stealth. An ignorant
confessor joined her mother-in-law and husband in the attempt to
hinder her from prayer and religious exercises. She endeavoured in
everything to please her husband, but he complained that she loved
God so much she had no love left for him. She was watched day and
night; she dared not stir from her mother-in-law’s chamber or her
husband’s bedside. If she took her work apart to the window, they
followed her there, to see that she was not in prayer. When her
husband went abroad, he forbade her to pray in his absence. The
affections even of her child were taken from her, and the boy was
taught to disobey and insult his mother. Thus utterly alone, Madame
Guyon, while apparently engaged in ordinary matters, was constantly
in a state of abstraction; her mind was elsewhere, rapt in devout
contemplation. She was in company without hearing a word that was
said. She went out into the garden to look at the flowers, and could
bring back no account of them, the eye of her reverie could mark
nothing actually visible. When playing at piquet, to oblige her
husband, this ‘interior attraction’ was often more powerfully felt
than even when at church. In her _Autobiography_ she describes her
experience as follows:—

‘The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their
contrivances and endeavours to disallow me any time for practising
it. I loved without motive or reason for loving; for nothing passed
in my head, but much in the innermost of my soul. I thought not
about any recompence, gift, or favour, or anything which regards the
lover. The Well-beloved was the only object which attracted my heart
wholly to Himself. I could not contemplate His attributes. I knew
nothing else but to _love_ and to _suffer_. Oh, ignorance more truly
learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me
Jesus Christ crucified, and brought me to be in love with His holy
cross! In its beginning I was attracted with so much force, that it
seemed as if my head was going to join my heart. I found that
insensibly my body bent in spite of me. I did not then comprehend
from whence it came; but have learned since, that as all passed in
the will, which is the sovereign of the powers, _that_ attracted the
others after it, and reunited them in God, their divine centre and
sovereign happiness. And as these powers were then unaccustomed to
be united, it required the more violence to effect that union.
Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so
strongly riveted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so strong
that I could have wished to die, in order to be inseparably united
without any interstice to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart.
As all passed in the will, the imagination and the understanding
being absorbed in it, in a union of enjoyment, I knew not what to
say, having never read or heard of such a state as I experienced;
for, before this, I had known nothing of the operations of God in
souls. I had only read _Philothea_ (written by St. Francis de
Sales), with the _Imitation of Christ_ (by Thomas à Kempis), and the
Holy Scriptures; also the _Spiritual Combat_, which mentions none of
these things.’[318]

In this extract she describes strange physical sensations as
accompanying her inward emotion. The intense excitement of the soul
assumes, in her over-strained and secluded imagination, the
character of a corporeal seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly
sensitive, appears to participate in the supernatural influences
communicated to the spirit. On a subsequent occasion, she speaks of
herself as so oppressed by the fulness of the Divine manifestations
imparted to her, as to be compelled to loosen her dress. More than
once some of those who sat next her imagined that they perceived a
certain marvellous efflux of grace proceeding from her to
themselves. She believed that many persons, for whom she was
interceding with great fervour, were sensible at the time of an
extraordinary gracious influence instantaneously vouchsafed, and
that her spirit communicated mysteriously, ‘in the Lord,’ with the
spirits of those dear to her when far away. She traced a special
intervention of Providence in the fact, that she repeatedly ‘felt a
strong draught to the door’ just when it was necessary to go out to
receive a secret letter from her friend, Mère Granger; that the rain
should have held up precisely when she was on her road to or from
mass; and that at the very intervals when she was able to steal out
to hear it, some priest was always found performing, or ready to
perform the service, though at a most unusual hour.[319]

V.

Imaginary as all this may have been, the Church of Rome, at least,
had no right to brand with the stigma of extravagance any such
transference of the spiritual to the sensuous, of the metaphysical
to the physical. The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect are
innocent enough in comparison with the monstrosities devised by
Romish marvel-mongers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip Neri
was so inflamed with love to God as to be insensible to all cold,
and burned with such a fire of devotion that his body, divinely
feverish, could not be cooled by exposure to the wildest winter
night. For two-and-fifty years he was the subject of a supernatural
palpitation, which kept his bed and chair, and everything moveable
about him, in a perpetual tremble. For that space of time his breast
was miraculously swollen to the thickness of a fist above his heart.
On a post-mortem examination of the holy corpse, it was found that
two of the ribs had been broken, to allow the sacred ardour of his
heart more room to play! The doctors swore solemnly that the
phenomenon could be nothing less than a miracle. A divine hand had
thus literally ‘enlarged the heart’ of the devotee.[320] St. Philip
enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously
elevated into the air by the fervour of his heavenward aspirations.
The _Acta Sanctorum_ relates how Ida of Louvain—seized with an
overwhelming desire to present her gifts with the Wise Men to the
child Jesus—received, on the eve of the Three Kings, the
distinguished favour of being permitted to swell to a terrific size,
and then gradually to return to her original dimensions. On another
occasion, she was gratified by being thrown down in the street in an
ecstacy, and enlarging so that her horror-stricken attendant had to
embrace her with all her might to keep her from bursting. The noses
of eminent saints have been endowed with so subtile a sense that
they have detected the stench of concealed sins, and enjoyed, as a
literal fragrance, the well-known odour of sanctity. St. Philip Neri
was frequently obliged to hold his nose and turn away his head when
confessing very wicked people. In walking the streets of some
depraved Italian town, the poor man must have endured all the pains
of Coleridge in Cologne, where, he says,

‘I counted two-and-seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!’

Maria of Oignys received what theurgic mysticism calls the gift of
jubilation. For three days and nights upon the point of death, she
sang without remission her ecstatic swan-song, at the top of a voice
whose hoarseness was miraculously healed. She felt as though the
wing of an angel were spread upon her breast, thrilling her heart
with the rapture, and pouring from her lips the praises, of the
heavenly world. With the melodious modulation of an inspired
recitative, she descanted on the mysteries of the Trinity and the
incarnation—improvised profound expositions of the Scripture—invoked
the saints, and interceded for her friends.[321] A nun who visited
Catharina Ricci in her ecstasy, saw with amazement her face
transformed into the likeness of the Redeemer’s countenance. St.
Hildegard, in the enjoyment and description of her visions, and in
the utterance of her prophecies, was inspired with a complete
theological terminology hitherto unknown to mortals. A glossary of
the divine tongue was long preserved among her manuscripts at
Wiesbaden.[322] It is recorded in the life of St. Veronica of
Binasco, that she received the miraculous gift of tears in a measure
so copious, that the spot where she knelt appeared as though a jug
of water had been overset there. She was obliged to have an earthen
vessel ready in her cell to receive the supernatural efflux, which
filled it frequently to the weight of several Milan pounds! Ida of
Nivelles, when in an ecstasy one day, had it revealed to her that a
dear friend was at the same moment in the same condition. The friend
also was simultaneously made aware that Ida was immersed in the same
abyss of divine light with herself. Thenceforward they were as one
soul in the Lord, and the Virgin Mary appeared to make a third in
the saintly fellowship. Ida was frequently enabled to communicate
with spiritual personages, without words, after the manner of
angelic natures. On one occasion, when at a distance from a priest
to whom she was much attached, both she and the holy man were
entranced at the same time; and, when wrapt to heaven, he beheld her
in the presence of Christ, at whose command she communicated to him,
by a spiritual kiss, a portion of the grace with which she herself
had been so richly endowed. To Clara of Montfaucon allusion has
already been made. In the right side of her heart was found,
completely formed, a little figure of Christ upon the cross, about
the size of a thumb. On the left, under what resembled the bloody
cloth, lay the instruments of the passion—the crown of thorns, the
nails, &c. So sharp was the miniature lance, that the Vicar-General
Berengarius, commissioned to assist at the examination by the Bishop
of Spoleto, pricked therewith his reverend finger. This marvel was
surpassed in the eighteenth century by a miracle more piquant still.
Veronica Giuliani caused a drawing to be made of the many forms and
letters which she declared had been supernaturally modelled within
her heart. To the exultation of the faithful—and the everlasting
confusion of all Jews, Protestants, and Turks—a post-mortem
examination disclosed the accuracy of her description, to the
minutest point. There were the sacred initials in a large and
distinct Roman character, the crown of thorns, two flames, seven
swords, the spear, the reed, &c.—all arranged just as in the diagram
she had furnished.[323] The diocese of Liège was edified, in the
twelfth century, by seeing, in the person of the celebrated
Christina Mirabilis, how completely the upward tendency of
protracted devotion might vanquish the law of gravitation. So
strongly was she drawn away from this gross earth, that the
difficulty was to keep her on the ground. She was continually flying
up to the tops of lonely towers and trees, there to enjoy a rapture
with the angels, and a roost with the birds. In the frequency, the
elevation, and the duration of her ascents into the air, she
surpassed even the high-flown devotion of St. Peter of Alcantara,
who was often seen suspended high above the fig-trees which
overshadowed his hermitage at Badajos—his eyes upturned, his arms
outspread—while the servant sent to summon him to dinner, gazed with
open mouth, and sublunary cabbage cooled below. The limbs of
Christina lost the rigidity, as her body lost the grossness, common
to vulgar humanity. In her ecstasies she was contracted into the
spherical form—her head was drawn inward and downward towards her
breast, and she rolled up like a hedgehog. When her relatives wished
to take and secure her, they had to employ a man to hunt her like a
bird. Having started his game, he had a long run across country
before he brought her down, in a very unsportsmanlike manner, by a
stroke with his bludgeon which broke her shin. When a few miracles
had been wrought to vindicate her aërostatic mission, she was
allowed to fly about in peace.[324] She has occupied, ever since,
the first place in the ornithology of Roman-catholic saintship. Such
are a few of the specimens which might be collected in multitudes
from Romanist records, showing how that communion has bestowed its
highest favour on the most coarse and materialised apprehensions of
spiritual truth. Extravagant inventions such as these—monstrous as
the adventures of Baron Münchausen, without their wit—have been
invested with the sanction and defended by the thunder of the Papal
chair. Yet this very Church of Rome incarcerated Molinos and Madame
Guyon as dangerous enthusiasts.

VI.

Madame Guyon had still some lessons to learn. On a visit to Paris,
the glittering equipages of the park, and the gaieties of St. Cloud,
revived the old love of seeing and being seen. During a tour in the
provinces with her husband, flattering visits and graceful
compliments everywhere followed such beauty, such accomplishments,
and such virtue, with a delicate and intoxicating applause.
Vanity—dormant, but not dead—awoke within her for the last time. She
acknowledged, with bitter self-reproach, the power of the world, the
weakness of her own resolves. In the spiritual desertion which
ensued, she recognised the displeasure of her Lord, and was
wretched. She applied to confessors—they were miserable comforters,
all of them. They praised her while she herself was filled with
self-loathing. She estimated the magnitude of her sins by the
greatness of the favour which had been shown her. The bland
worldliness of her religious advisers could not blind so true a
heart, or pacify so wakeful a conscience. She found relief only in a
repentant renewal of her self-dedication to the Saviour, in
renouncing for ever the last remnant of confidence in any strength
of her own.

It was about this period that she had a remarkable conversation with
a beggar, whom she found upon a bridge, as, followed by her footman,
she was walking one day to church. This singular mendicant refused
her offered alms—spoke to her of God and divine things—and then of
her own state, her devotion, her trials, and her faults. He declared
that God required of her not merely to labour as others did to
secure their salvation, that they might escape the pains of hell,
but to aim at such perfection and purity in this life, as to escape
those of purgatory. She asked him who he was. He replied, that he
had formerly been a beggar, but now was such no more;—mingled with
the stream of people, and she never saw him afterwards.[325]

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 proceeding 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.[326]

VII.

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 more painful stage on the road to
self-annihilation 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.[327] 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.

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
favour, she naturally sank deeper and deeper in despondency. A
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 awhile. 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 unqualified 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.

The 22nd 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 La Combe 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.

VIII.

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
neighbouring 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 necessitated 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 favoured 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.’[328]

She describes herself as having ceased from all self-originated
action and choice. 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. ‘I 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.[329]

Somewhat later she expresses herself as follows:—