of her trappings, the gifts that had ornamented her: he snatches off her garments, that is to say, the virtues in which she had been enveloped. O shame! She sees herself naked, and knows not where to hide! This is not yet enough; her beauty is taken away. O horror! She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes loathsome. The faster she runs towards God, "the more she is soiled by the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed, she loses a taste for every thing, understanding, memory, and will; lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is her favourite," and would be a substitute for all (the idea that she is the child of God). This is properly the death at which she must arrive at last. Let nobody, neither the director nor any other, attempt to relieve her. She must die, and be put in the ground; be trodden under foot and walked upon, become foul, and rotten, and suffer the stench of corruption, until rottenness becoming dust and ashes, hardly any thing may remain to testify that the soul ever existed. What was the soul, if it still thinks, must apparently think, that all it can now do is to remain motionless in the bosom of the earth. Now, however, it begins to feel something surprising! Has the sun darted a ray through a crack in the tomb? perhaps only for one moment? No, the effect is durable, the dead soul revives, recovers some strength, a sort of life. But this is no longer her own life, it is life in God. She has no longer any thing of her own, neither will nor desire. What has she to do to possess what she loves? Nothing, nothing, eternally nothing. But can she have any defects in this state? Doubtless she has; she knows them, but does nothing to get rid of them *: to be able to do so, she would have to become as before, thoughtful about herself.” These are little mists which she must allow to disappear gradually. The soul has now God for soul; he is now become her principle of life, he is one and identical with her. "In this state nothing extraordinary happens, no visions, revelations, ecstasies, nor transports. All such things do not belong to this system, which is simple, pure, and naked, seeing nothing but in God, as God sees himself, and by his eyes." Thus, after many immoral and dangerous things, the soul ends in a singular purity, which few mystics have even approached. A gentle new birth, without either visions or ecstasies, and a sight divinely pure and serene, is the lot of that soul, which has passed through all the various shadows of death. If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed, soiled, and destroyed, will revive in God. He who has passed through all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has * Madame Guyon's Torrents, (Opusc. Cologne, 1701,) p. 291. become a corpse, which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become ashes and clay—even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the sun. What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this death is not our own; our personality extinguished, effaced, and annihilated, will be succeeded by another, infinite and perfect, I allow, but still not ours. I had not yet read the Torrents when all this was, for the first time, represented to my mind. I was ascending St. Gothard, and had advanced to meet the violent Reuss that rushes madly down the mountain in its headlong course. My imagination conjured up, in spite of myself, the terrible strugglings with which it labours to force its way through rocks that would hem it in, and bar its progress. I was frightened at its falls and the efforts it seemed to make, like a poor soul on the rack, to fly from itself, and hide where it might be seen no more. It writhes at the Devil's Bridge, and, in the midst of its agony, hurled from an immense height to the bottom of the abyss, it ceases for a moment to be a river: it becomes a tempest between heaven and earth, an icy vapour, a horrible frosty blast, that fills the dark valley with an infernal mist. Mount higher, and higher still. You traverse a cavern, and pass a hollow rock. Lo! the uproar ceases; this grand F battle of the elements is over. Peace and silence reign. And life?—is it renewed. Do you find a new-birth after this death-struggle? The meadow is blighted, the flowers are gone, and the very grass is scarce and poor. Nothing in nature stirs, not a bird in the air, not an insect on the earth. You see the sun again, it is true, but void of rays and heat. CHAPTER VIII. FENELON AS DIRECTOR. HIS QUIETISM. FENELON AND MADAME DE LA MAISON MADAME GUYON was not apparently the extravagant and chimerical person that her enemies pretend, since, on her arrival at Paris from Savoy, she managed to captivate and secure, at her first onset, the man, of all others, the most capable of giving a relish to her doctrines - a man of genius, who, moreover, had an infinite fund of sagacity and address, and who, independently of all these merits, possessed what had dispensed, if necessary, with every other qualification, being, at that time, the director the most in vogue. This new Chantal required a St. François de Sales; she found one in Fenelon, who was less serene and innocent, it is true, and less refulgent with boyhood and seraphic grace, but eminently noble and shrewd, subtle, eloquent, close, very devout and very intriguing. * * See the learned Tabaraud, (Supplement to Bausset's History, 1832,) and the very shrewd and judicious appreciation of two excellent critics, Mr. Monty (On the Duke of Burgundy), and Mr. Thomas (A Province in the Reign of Louis XIV.). |