all things in the Divine union. I could no more separate holy crea tures from God, regarded as the source of their holiness, than I could consider the sun's rays as existing distinct from the sun itself, and living and shining by virtue of their own power of life. This was true of the greatest saints. I could not see the saints, Peter and Paul, and the Virgin Mary, and others, as separate from God, but as being all that they are, from Him and in Him, in oneness. I could not behold them out of God; but I beheld them all in Him."" (p. 44.)

Thus she reconciled herself to the worship of the saints, and particularly of the Virgin Mary. She could not practise it herself; but she defended it in others. Her biographer, who can seldom admit that she was wrong, does in this instance venture to say, that "on what principles she maintained the consistency of her Roman Catholic profession, with her refusal to worship the saints and the Virgin, is not entirely obvious; but undoubtedly," he adds with a simplicity greatly to be admired, "she was able to do it, to her own satisfaction." How she did it, she herself tells us, in the passage we have quoted, as well as in another passage which presents as curious a specimen of self-imposition as we perhaps ever read. ·

"One day,' she says, 'considering in my mind why it was that I could not, like others, call upon any of the saints in prayer, though closely united to them in God, the thought occurred to me, that domestics, in other words, those in a merely justified state, the be ginners in the Christian life, the servants rather than the sons of God, might possibly have some need of the influence and intercession of the saints; while the spouse obtains everything she needs without such helps. God, regarding such a soul as purchased by the blood of Christ, and as brought into union with Himself, and sustained in union by Christ's merits, neither seeks nor accepts any other influence, or any other intercession. Oh! how little known is the holy Author of all Good!'"

We need scarcely detain the reader by offering any remarks upon what we cannot term less than the folly of this reasoning. A servant of God, a person in a justified state, may possibly need the intercession of the saints. Why so! Because, (for the argument amounts to this) though justified, their souls are not yet purchased by the blood of Christ, not brought into union with Him, nor sustained in union by His merits; for were this the case, God would not either seek or accept on their behalf of any other influence, or any other intercession, than that of his own dear Son. "Oh, how little known is the holy Author of all Good." Certainly Madame Guyon could have known but little of Him, when she ventured thus to trifle with His commands, and in her ignorance to traduce His character.

And yet she thought she knew a great deal. She had under

taken to write a commentary on the Bible. "It extends to twelve small octavo volumes on the Old Testament and eight on the New." It ought to be a valuable work, for if its author was not utterly deceived, the commentary, like the Bible itself, is in the proper sense inspired.

"I wrote my commentaries on the Scriptures," she says, "for the most part in the night, in time taken from sleep. The Lord was 80 present to me in this work, and kept me so under control, that I both began and left off writing just as He was pleased to order it; writing when He gave me inward light and strength, and stopping when He withheld them. I wrote with very great rapidity, light being diffused within me in such a manner, that I found I had in myself latent treasures of perception and knowledge, of which I had but little previous conception."

Of this work we are told, and we can believe it, that "the most remarkable part is that upon the Canticles;" although king David found a commentator in this pious lady, who writes of him in a strain worthy of a spiritual medium, or an American table-talker. "In writing my commentaries on the books of Kings, when I gave attention to those parts which had relation to king David, I felt a very remarkable communion of spirit with him, as much so almost as if he had been present with me. Even before I had commenced writing, in my previous and preparatory contemplations I had experienced this union." Is this sheer nonsense or something worse? Would she give us to understand that, with Swedenborg or the American spiritualists, she had the power of communicating with the spirits of the dead; or is it only an inflated method of stating a very ordinary truth, that as she studied the Scripture, the Scripture disclosed new beauties to her mental eye?-that as she dwelt upon the character of David, she perceived that it contained more lessons of heavenly wisdom than she had supposed to lie beneath the surface of the story? The reader must determine the point, and he will be obliged to do so by the greater or less amount of his charity; for other evidence there is none to sway his judgment on either side. The commentary was followed up by another work, which she entitles, d Short Method of Prayer. It contains passages of such moral grandeur, so true, so spiritual, that as we read them we are half disposed to throw aside all that we have written, and leave a book in which the good and ill so frequently alternate, to make its own way or sink by its own weight. But this may not be. Wholesale praise, or wholesale blame, are equally acceptable to different classes, even of true Christians; but both are wrong. It is theirs to learn to discern things that differ, and ours to assist them in the toilsome, and often thankless, work. Nothing, for instance, can be more admirable than her appeal to religious pastors and teachers :

"The cause," she says, "of our being so unsuccessful in reforming mankind, especially the lower class, is our beginning with external matters;—in this way, if we produce any fruit, it is fruit which perishes. We should begin with principles, which reach the interior, and tend to renovate the heart. This is the true and the ready process; to teach men to seek and to know God in the heart-by affections rather than by forms. Thus we lead the soul to the fountain.

Impressed with the importance of the religion of the heart, I be seech all who have the care of souls, to put them at once into the spiritual way. Preach to them Jesus Christ. He himself, by the precious blood He hath shed for those intrusted to you, conjures you to speak, not to that which is outward, but to the heart of His Jerusalem. O ye dispensers of His graces, ye preachers of His word, ye ministers of His sacraments, labour to establish Christ's kingdom! As it is the heart alone which can oppose Christ's sovereignty, so it is by the subjection of the heart that His sovereignty is most highly exalted. Employ means, compose catechisms, and whatever other methods may be proper, but aim at the heart. Teach the prayer of the heart, and not of the understanding; the prayer of God's Spirit, and not of man's invention." (pp. 244, 245.)

Yet as a whole the treatise is both faulty and dangerous. Pure love lies at the foundation, and the edifice is rotten. She says:

"No man can be wholly the Lord's, unless he is wholly consecrated to the Lord; and no man can know whether he is thus wholly consecrated, except by tribulation. That is the test." No: that is not the test; although Romanists, and all others who seek to be justified by a righteousness of their own, would have it so. "6 Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit." That is the test. St. John mentions several collateral tests; as, that we love the brethren, that we love God, and that we have the faith that worketh by love; but the legal test, or that of tribulation, on which Madam Guyon insists, he never mentions. Yet she goes on to assure us that it is not only "the test, but the only true test of a true state." The following extract we are disposed to regard as idle and mischievous, somnolent and dreamy. We do not say more, because we cannot satisfy ourselves that we quite understand it; perhaps the reader's penetration may be more

acute :

"13. Of the soul in the state of pure or unselfish love.

"When we have given ourselves to God in abandonment, and have exercised faith in God that He does now, and that He will ever, receive us and make us one with Himself, then God becomes central in the soul, and all which is the opposite of God gradually dissolves itself, if one may so speak, and passes away.

"SELF is now destroyed. The soul, recognizing God as its centre, is filled with love, which, as it places God first, and everything else in the proper relation to Him, may be regarded as pure. It is not until we arrive at this state, in the entire destruction and loss of self, that

we acknowledge, in the highest and truest sense, God's supreme existence; still less do we, or can we, have God as a life within us.

"In experimental religion there are two great and important views -perhaps there are none more important-which are expressed by the single terms, the ALL and the NOTHING. We must_become Nothing in ourselves, before we can receive the All or Fulness of God." (pp. 241, 242.)

Equally unintelligible to us is the section which follows:"14. Of the practice of the prayer of silence.

"When the soul has reached this degree of experience, it is disposed to practise the PRAYER OF SILENCE, so called, not merely because it excludes the voice, but because it has so simplified its petitions, that it has hardly anything to say, except to breathe forth, in a desire UNSPOKEN, Thy will be done. This prayer, so simple and yet so comprehensive, may be said to embody the whole state of the soul. And believing that this prayer is and must be fulfilled moment by moment, the constant fruition crowns the constant request, and it rejoices in what it has, as well as in what it seeks.

"The soul in this Divine prayer acts more nobly and more extensively than it had ever done before; since God himself is its mover, and it now acts as it is acted upon by the agency of the Holy Ghost. When St. Paul speaks of our being led by the Spirit of God, it is not meant that we should cease from action; but that our action should be in harmony with and in subordination to the Divine action. This is finely represented by the prophet Ezekiel's vision of the wheels, which had a living spirit; and whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went; they ascended and descended as they were moved; for the spirit of life was in them, and they returned not when they went."

6

Madame Guyon frequently insists on this prayer of silence; -prayer "so simplified that it has hardly anything to say except to breathe forth the UNSPOKEN desire, Thy will be done."" No doubt this is the highest of all petitions. It indicates a state of mind greatly to be coveted; perhaps the best to which we can attain on earth; but that is not the point in question. What is gained by addressing our petitions to the Majesty on high "unspoken?" Our blessed Lord in prayer made use of language as the vehicle of thought; He lifted up His voice; "He said, O Father, I thank thee," &c. He prayed again, "saying the same words." Are we to be wiser than He? Would Madame Guyon and the mystics raise us to a higher state and to a closer intimacy with the Father, than the Son of man enjoyed? We decline to follow them in their perilous adWe have no ambition to be holier than our Lord. We are of opinion that it is enough for the disciple to be as his Master. Indeed this notion of voiceless prayer is altogether a delusion, as unphilosophical as it is unscriptural. Except a few ideas derived from sensation, and therefore almost exclusively of a sensual, or (to use a word lately introduced by writers on mental science, as less offensive) of a sensuous character, it may be questioned whether the mind is capable of a train of thought

venture.

divorced from language. Words are necessary as a vehicle both to introduce the thought and to sustain it in the mind. A train of thought presupposes and demands a train of words. Prayer, thanksgiving, meditation, are mental exercises no less than spiritual ones. Any one can make the experiment for himself; let him try to think, and at the same moment let him, if he can, repel the resolute intrusion of language, and tell us the effect. We will venture to anticipate his communication; it will lie between these two results, of which the first is the more likely. He will tell us that he fell fast asleep, or that he fell into a waking stupor; that state of mental torpor which is a fool's paradise, and a wise man's abhorrence.

Bossuet was at this time the acknowledged leader of the Gallican church. "By his work, entitled, A History of the Variations of the Doctrines of the Reformed Churches, in which he had subjected the doctrines of Luther and of the other Protestant reformers to a severe scrutiny, he had not only acquired a splendid reputation, but had placed himself in a position which led him to be regarded by Roman Catholics as emphatically the defender of the faith." He was no doubt annoyed to find not only that a woman was at the head of a large and hostile party, but that she led in her train such men as Fénélon, and others scarcely less distinguished. He was therefore induced to seek for an interview with Madame Guyon, and to attempt her conversion from what he regarded as a heresy to the true Catholic faith. Several conversations followed, which Mr. Upham gives his readers chiefly in her own words. Without impeaching her veracity, we may conclude that she does full justice to her own share in these discussions. To us Protestants nothing can be more amusing than these "wit-combats" between the ablest divine, and the most acute and accomplished lady, in France. Both are in a false position; both are evidently ashamed of the grosser doctrines of the church. Both agree tacitly to set at nought its authority; both profess the most profound veneration for it. Bossuet endeavours to persuade his fair adversary that Romanism, as he held it, was in accordance with the Scriptures. Madame Guyon has a still harder task: she endeavours to persuade her opponent that her system of theology is consistent both with the Bible and with a dutiful allegiance to the church of Rome. He attempts to silence her, by showing that her doctrine is contrary to the Scriptures, and to some of the greatest theologians, to whom alone he thinks it prudent to refer. His opponent shows at least as accurate an acquaintance with the Scriptures as himself. He was an ecclesiastical metaphysician of renown; but her subtleties confound him, while at the same time her wit must have tried his politeness to the utmost; for nothing can exceed the courtesy on both sides. Bossuet has been reminding her of the differences laid down by theological doctors between what he terms passively active and co