Chapter I (2)

‘The soul passing out of itself by dying to itself 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 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.’[330]

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. When the soul has thus passed, as she phrases it,
out of the Nothing into the All, when its feet are set in ‘a large
room’ (nothing less, according to her interpretation, than the
compass of Infinity), ‘a substantial or essential word’ is spoken
there. It is a continuous word—potent, ineffable, ever uttered
without language. It is the immediate unchecked operation of
resident Deity. What it speaks, it effects. It is blissful and
mysterious as the language of heaven. 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 of the Bible,
and the casual expressions of others, somewhat after the fashion of
the _Sortes Virgilianæ_ 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 such a view of the
inward light to its worst extreme.

IX.

The admixture of error in the doctrine which Madame Guyon was
henceforward to preach with so much self-denying love, so much
intrepid constancy, appears to us to lie upon the surface. The
passages we have given convey, unquestionably, the idea of a
practical substitution of God for the soul in the case of the
perfectly sanctified. The soul within the soul is Deity. When all is
desolate, silent, the divine Majesty arises, thinks, feels, and
acts, within the transformed humanity. It is quite true that, as
sanctification progresses, Christian virtue becomes more easy as the
new habit gains strength. In many respects it is true, as Madame
Guyon says, that effort would be requisite to neglect or violate
certain duties or commands rather than to perform them. But this
facility results from the constitution of our nature. We carry on
the new economy within with less outcry, less labour, less confusion
and resistance than we did when the revolution was recent, but we
carry it on still—working with divine assistance. God works _in_
man, but not _instead_ of man. It is one thing to harmonize, in some
measure, the human will with the divine, another to substitute
divine volitions for the human. Every man has within him
Conscience—the judge often bribed or clamoured down; Will—the
marshal; Imagination—the poet; Understanding—the student; Desire—the
merchant, venturing its store of affection, and gazing out on the
future in search of some home-bound argosy of happiness. But all
these powers are found untrue to their allegiance. The ermine—the
baton—the song—the books—the merchandize, are at the service of a
usurper—Sin. When the Spirit renews the mind, there is no
massacre—no slaughterous sword filling with death the streets of the
soul’s city, and making man the ruin of his former self. These
faculties are restored to loyalty, and reinstated under God. Then
Conscience gives verdict, for the most part, according to the divine
statute-book, and is habitually obeyed. Then the lordly Will assumes
again a lowly yet noble vassalage. Then the dream of Imagination is
a dream no longer, for the reality of heaven transcends it. Then the
Understanding burns the magic books in the market-place, and breaks
the wand of its curious arts—but studies still, for eternity as well
as time. The activity of Desire amasses still, according to its
nature,—for _some_ treasure man must have. But the treasure is on
earth no longer. It is the advantage of such a religion that the
very same laws of our being guide our spiritual and our natural
life. The same self-controul and watchful diligence which built up
the worldly habits towards the summits of success, may be applied at
once to those habits which ripen us for heaven. The old experience
will serve. But the mystic can find no common point between himself
and other men. He is cut off from them, for he believes he has
another constitution of being, inconceivable by them—not merely
other tastes and a higher aim. The _object_ of Christian love may be
incomprehensible, but the affection itself is not so. It is
dangerous to represent it as a mysterious and almost unaccountable
sentiment, which finds no parallel in our experience elsewhere. Our
faith in Christ, as well as our love to Christ, are similar to our
faith and love as exercised towards our fellow-creatures.
Regeneration imparts no new faculty, it gives only a new direction
to the old.

X.

Quietism opposed to the mercenary religion of the common and
consistent Romanism around it, the doctrine of disinterested love.
Revolting from the coarse machinery of a corrupt system, it took
refuge in an unnatural refinement. The love inculcated in Scripture
is equally remote from the impracticable indifference of Quietism
and the commercial principle of Superstition. Long ago, at
Alexandria, Philo endeavoured to escape from an effete and carnal
Judaism to a similar elevation. The Persian Sufis were animated with
the same ambition in reaction against the frigid legalism of the
creed of Islam. Extreme was opposed to extreme, in like manner, when
Quietism, disgusted with the unblushing inconsistencies of nominal
Christianity, proclaimed its doctrine of _perfection_—of complete
sanctification by faith. This is not a principle peculiar to
mysticism. It is of little practical importance. It is difficult to
see how it can be applied to individual experience. The man who has
reached such a state of purity must be the last to know it. If we do
not, by some strange confusion of thought, identify ourselves with
God, the nearer we approach Him the more profoundly must we be
conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see
reflected the bird that sings in an overhanging tree, and the bird
that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is
highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness.
Madame Guyon admits that she found it necessary jealously to guard
humility, to watch and pray—that her state was only of
‘_comparative_ immutability.’ It appears to us that perfection is
prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically
inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have
attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more
advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.

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, especially, 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
sentiment rather than a request,—a continuous sense of submission,
which breathes, moment by moment, from the serene depth of the soul,
‘Thy will be done.’[331]

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 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 in founding convents—a slave to the
interests of the clergy. So they made a saint of Theresa, and a
confessor of Madame Guyon.

XI.

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 mission, she
could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around
her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency
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 Quietest 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 rigour of a northern winter. The 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.

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 I had to say.’[332] 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 the
austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she
was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of
hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing
correspondence. In the former place she wrote her _Torrents_, in the
latter, she published her _Short Method of Prayer_, and commenced
her _Commentaries on the Bible_.[333]

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 bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice,
spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—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 living flesh instead of mere 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 came an episcopal order to quit the
diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she
encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to
take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock
in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against
her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.

Note to page 214.

_Autobiography_, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour, described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her children who really do so, as heretical, _i.e._, reformatory, in their tendency.

Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John. Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’ The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists, with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed ‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does and wills.’—P. 70.

Note to page 218.

She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—_Autobiography_, part II. c. xii.

There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me, with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything.... Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting SELF be destroyed, I was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—_Ibid._ p. 51.

She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words. She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal communications.

Here Madame Guyon anticipates the Quakers. Compare Barclay’s _Apology_, Prop. xi. §§ 6, 7.

Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she describes herself as favoured, from the plenitude which filled her soul, with ‘a discharge on her best-disposed children to their mutual joy and comfort, and not only when present, but sometimes when absent.’ ‘I even felt it,’ she adds, ‘to flow from me into their souls. When they wrote to me, they informed me that at such times they had received abundant infusions of divine grace.’—_Ibid._ part III. c. i.

Note to page 223.

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xiii. Here Madame Guyon has found confessors blind guides, and confessions profitless; and furthermore, she is encouraged and instructed in the inward life by a despised layman. There is every reason to believe that the experience of Madame Guyon, and the doctrines of the beggar, were shared to some extent by many more. Madame Guyon speaks as Theresa does of the internal pains of the soul as equivalent to those of purgatory. (c. xi.) The teaching of the quondam mendicant concerning an internal and present instead of a future purgatory, was not in itself contrary to the declarations of orthodox mysticism. But many were beginning to seek in this perfectionist doctrine a refuge from the exactions of the priesthood. With creatures of the clergy like Theresa, or with monks like John of the Cross, such a tenet would be retained within the limits required by the ecclesiastical interest. It might stimulate religious zeal—it would never intercept religious obedience. But it was not always so among the people—it was not so with many of the followers of Molinos. The jealous vigilance of priestcraft saw that it had everything to fear from a current belief among the laity, that a state of spiritual perfection, rendering purgatory needless, was of possible attainment—might be reached by secret self-sacrifice, in the use of very simple means. If such a notion prevailed, the lucrative traffic of indulgences might totter on the verge of bankruptcy. No devotee would impoverish himself to buy exemption hereafter from a purifying process which he believed himself now experiencing, in the hourly sorrows he patiently endured. It was at least possible—it had been known to happen, that the soul which struggled to escape itself—to rise beyond the gifts of God, to God—to ascend, beyond words and means, to repose in Him,—which desired only the Divine will, feared only the Divine displeasure,—which sought to ignore so utterly its own capacity and power, might come to attach paramount importance no longer to the powers of the priesthood and the ritual of the Church. Those aspirations which had been the boast of Rome in the few, became her terror in the many. The Quietest might believe himself sincere in orthodoxy, might choose him a director, and might reverence the sacraments. But such abasement and such ambition—distress so deep, and aims so lofty—would often prove alike beyond the reach of the ordinary confessional. The oily syllables of absolution would drop in vain upon the troubled waves of a nature thus stirred to its inmost depths. And if it could receive peace only from the very hand of God, priestly mediation must begin with shame to take a lower place. The value of relics and of masses, of penances and paternosters, would everywhere fall. An absolute indifference to self-interest would induce indifference also to those priestly baits by which that self-interest was allured. Such were the presentiments which urged the Jesuits of Rome to hunt down Molinos, with all the implacability of fear. The craft was in danger. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ._

Note to page 224.

See the _Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon_, &c., by Thomas C. Upham (New York, 1851); vol. i. p. 153. Mr. Upham, in this and in some other parts of his excellent biography, appears to me to have fallen into the same error with Madame Guyon. He perceives her mistake in regarding the absence of joy as evidence of the absence of the divine favour. But he contrasts the state in which we are conscious of alacrity and joy in religion—as one in which we still live comparatively by _sight_, with that condition of privation in which all such enjoyment is withdrawn—a state wherein we are called to live, not by sight, but by pure and naked _faith_. Now, faith and sight are not thus opposed in Scripture. In the New Testament, faith is always practical belief in what God has revealed; and sight, as the opposite course of life, always so much unbelief—undue dependence on things seen and temporal. It is quite true that too much stress should not be laid by us on the intensity or the displays of mere emotion,—since religion is a principle rather than a sentiment. But not a few have been nursed in dangerous delusion by supposing that when they feel within them scarce a trace of any of those desires or dispositions proper to every Christian heart—when they have no glimpse of what they incorrectly term ‘sight’—then is the time to exercise what they suppose to be faith,—that is, to work themselves up to the obstinate persuasion that they personally are still the children of God.

It may well be questioned, moreover, whether we have any scriptural ground for believing that it is usual with the Almighty, for the growth of our sanctification, to withdraw Himself,—the only source of it. To these supposed hidings of His face Madame Guyon, and every Quietist, would patiently submit, as to the sovereign and inscrutable caprice of the divine Bridegroom of the soul. Rather should we regard such obscurations as originating with ourselves and not with Him, and at once make the lost sense of His gracious nearness the object of humble and earnest search. ‘Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation!’

Madame Guyon describes her ‘state of total privation’ in the twenty-first chapter of the _Autobiography_, part I.

Footnote 315:

See the first six chapters of her _Autobiography_. This life was
published posthumously at Cologne, in 1720. I have used an anonymous
English translation, published at Bristol, in 1772.

Footnote 316:

See Note on p. 238.

Footnote 317:

_Autobiography_, chap. x.

Footnote 318:

_Autobiography_, chap. xii. p. 87.

Footnote 319:

See second Note on p. 238.

Footnote 320:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, b. IV. c. i.

Footnote 321:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, pp. 70-73.

Footnote 322:

Specimens of the language may be seen in Görres, p. 152.

Footnote 323:

Görres, _Die Christliche Mystik_, pp. 465, &c.

Footnote 324:

_Ibid._ pp. 532, &c.

Footnote 325:

See Note on p. 239.

Footnote 326:

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xv.

Footnote 327:

See Note on p. 240.

Footnote 328:

_Autobiography_, part I. c. xxviii. p. 163.

Footnote 329:

This spontaneity she likens to a fountain, as compared with a pump;
love in the heart prompts every issue of life: outward occasions and
stimulants are no longer awaited; and a glad inward readiness gives
facility in every duty, patience under every trial. Such also is the
teaching of Fénélon here—the genuine doctrine of spiritual life. But
the enemies of Quietism were not slow to represent this ‘practising
the virtues no longer as virtues,’ as a dangerous pretence for evading
the obligations of virtue altogether.

Footnote 330:

Upham, vol. I. pp. 262, 263.

Footnote 331:

This Prayer of Silence became hers at an early period in her religious
career, not as the result of direct effort in pursuance of a theory,
but simply as the consequence of overpowering emotion. She says, ‘I
had a secret desire given me from that time to be wholly devoted to
the disposal of my God, let it be what it would. I said, ‘What couldst
Thou demand of me, that I would not willingly sacrifice or offer Thee?
Oh, spare me not.’ I could scarce hear speak of God, or our Lord Jesus
Christ, without being almost ravished out of myself. What surprised me
the most, was the great difficulty I had to say the vocal prayers I
had been used to say. As soon as I opened my lips to pronounce them,
the love of God seized me so strongly that I was swallowed up in a
profound silence, and a peace not to be expressed. I made fresh
essays, but still in vain. I began, but could not go on. And as I had
never before heard of such a state, I knew not what to do. My
inability therein still increased, because my love to God was still
growing more strong, more violent, and more overpowering. There was
made in me, without the sound of words, a continual prayer, which
seemed to me to be the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself; a
prayer of the Word, which is made by the Spirit, which, according to
St. Paul, ‘asketh for us that which is good, perfect, and conformable
to the will of God.’—_Autobiography_, part I. c. xiii.

Here we find genuine devout fervour, emancipating itself, very
naturally in private, from allotted forms of prayer; but no mysticism,
till we come to the last sentence—even that, admitting a favourable
explanation.

Footnote 332:

_Autobiography_, part II. c. xvii. ‘God supplied me,’ she adds, ‘with
what was pertinent and satisfactory to them all, after a wonderful
manner, without any share of my study or meditation therein. Nothing
was hid from me of their interior state, and of what passed within
them. Here, O my God! thou madest an infinite number of conquests,
known to Thyself only. They were instantly furnished with a wonderful
facility of prayer. God conferred on them His grace plentifully, and
wrought marvellous changes in them. The most advanced of these souls
found, when with me, in silence, a grace communicated to them, which
they could neither comprehend nor cease to admire. The others found an
unction in my words, and that they operated in them what I said to
them. They said they had never experienced anything like it. Friars of
different orders, and priests of merit, came to see me, to whom our
Lord granted very great favours, as indeed he did to all without
exception, who came in sincerity. One thing was surprising, and that
was, that I had not a word to say to such as came only to watch my
words and to criticise them. Even when I thought to try to speak to
them, I felt that I could not, and that God would not have me do
it.... I felt that what I spoke flowed from the fountain, and that I
was only the instrument of Him who made me speak.’—P. 86.

Footnote 333:

The little book to which she gave the name of _The Torrents_, was
written, she tells us, at the suggestion of La Combe. When she took up
her pen she knew not what she was to say, but soon came thoughts and
words abundantly—as, indeed, they were sure to do. She compares the
different kinds of spiritual progress to the mountain streams she had
seen hurrying down the sides of the Alps. She describes the varieties
in the gravitation of devout souls toward God—the ocean which they
seek. Some proceed slowly, by means of meditations, austerities, and
works of charity,—dependent mostly on outward appliances,—deficient in
spontaneity and ardour,—little exercised by inward experience. Another
class flow in a fuller stream,—grow into laden rivers—haste with more
strength and speed; but these are apt to dwell, with too much
complacence, on those rich gifts for which they are conspicuous. A
third order (and to these she herself belonged) dash out from the
poverty of the rocks, impetuous, leaping over every obstacle,
unburdened by wealthy freightage, inglorious in the eyes of men, but
simple, naked, self-emptied, with resistless eagerness foaming up out
of abysmal chasms that seemed to swallow them, and finding, soonest of
all, that Sea divine, wherein all rivers rest.

Her commentaries on Scripture were written with extraordinary
rapidity. The fact that she consulted no book except the Bible in
their composition must doubtless have contributed to their speed:
certainly not, as she fancied, to their excellence. No writers are so
diffuse as the mystics, because no others have written so fast,
imagining headlong haste an attribute of inspiration. The transcriber
could not copy in five days what she had written in one night. We may
conjecture that the man must have been paid by the day. The commentary
on the Canticles was written in a day and a half, and several visits
received beside.—_Autobiography_, part II. c. xxi.