- on her return. They, on their part, re-highway where every passing foot might proached her with unnatural indifference trample it in the dust. towards her own family for the sake of her A severe illness brought her more than once new connexions. The ingenious malignity to the brink of the grave. She heard of her of her mother-in-law filled every day with danger with indifference, for life had no atfresh vexations. The high spirit of the young traction. Heavy losses befell the familygirl was completely broken. She had already she could feel no concern. To end her days gained a reputation for cleverness and wit in a hospital was even an agreeable anticipanow she sat nightmared in company, nervous, tion. Poverty and disgrace could bring no stiff, and silent, the picture of stupidity. At change which would not be more tolerable every assemblage of their friends she was than her present suffering. She labored, with marked out for some affront, and every visitor little success, to find comfort in religious at the house was instructed in the catalogue exercises. She examined herself rigidly, conof her offences. Sad thoughts would come fessed with frequency, strove to subdue all how different might all this have been had care about her personal appearance, and while she been suffered to select some other suitor! her maid arranged her hair-how, she cared But it was too late. The brief romance of not- was lost in the study of Thomas à her life was gone indeed. There was no Kempis. At length she consulted a Francisfriend into whose heart she could pour her can, a holy man, who had just emerged from sorrows. Meanwhile, she was indefatigable a five years' solitude. Madame," said he, in the discharge of every duty-she endeav-" you are disappointed and perplexed because ored by kindness, by cheerful forbearance, by you seek without what you have within. Acreturning good for evil, to secure some kinder custom yourself to seek God in your heart, she was ready to cut out her and you will find him." 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 incomprehensi treatment ble. - 66 These words of the old Franciscan embody the response which has been uttered in every ago 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 Her best course would have been self-asser- was intractable his hand seemed to have tion and war to the very utmost. She would lost its skill-he could not approach his have been justified in demanding her right to ideal. When about to relinquish his efforts be mistress in her own house-in declaring in despair, a voice in a dream bade him shape it incompatible with the obligations binding the figure from the oak-block, which was upon either side that a third party should be about to feed his hearth. He obeyed, and permitted to sow dissension between a hus- produced a masterpiece. This story repreband and wife-in putting her husband, sents the truth which mysticism upholds finally to the choice between his wife and when it appears as the antagonist of superhis mother. M. Guyon is the type of a large stitious externalism. The materials of religclass of men. They stand high in the eye of ious happiness lie, as it were, near at hand the world—and not altogether undeservedly - among affections and desires which are -as men of principle. But their domestic homely, common, and of the fireside. Let circle is the scene of cruel wrongs from want the right direction, the heavenly influence, of reflection, from a selfish, passionate incon- be received from without; and heaven is residerateness. They would be shocked at the garded with the love of home, and home charge of an act of barbarity towards a sanctified by the hope of heaven. The farstranger, but they will inflict years of mental fetched costliness of outward works distress on those most near to them, for want restless, selfish bargaining with aceticism and of decision, self-control, and some conscien- with priestcraft for a priceless heaven, can tious estimate of what their home duties truly never redeem and renew a soul to peace. But involve. Had the obligations he neglected, mysticism has not stopped here; it takes a the wretchedness of which he was indirectly step farther, and that step is false. It would the author, been brought fairly before the seclude the soul too much from the external mind of M. Guyon, he would probably have and to free it from a snare, removes a necesdetermined on the side of justice, and a do- sary help. Like some overshadowing tree, it mestic revolution would have been the conse- hides the rising plant from the force of storms, quence. But Madame Guyon conceived her- but it also intercepts the appointed sunshine self bound to suffer in silence. Looking back - it protects, but it deprives and beneath on those miserable days she traced a Father's its boughs hardy weeds have grown more care in the discipline she endured. Prov- vigorously than precious grain. Removing, idence had transplanted Self from a garden, more or less, the counterpoise of the latter, where it expanded to love and praise, to al in its zeal for the spirit, it promotes an in- the ; tense 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 a similar overweening sense of personality. Thus isolated in the air-abstracted so elaborately from earth and all its standards of comparison - his tendency has been, from the days of Plotinus downwards, to expand the Ego into the Infinite. It has been the dream of many a mystic, that he could elaborate from the depth of his own nature the whole promised land of religious truth, and perceive, by special revelation, rising from within all its green pastures and still waters - somewhat as Pindar describes the sun beholding the isle of Rhodes emerging from the bottom of the ocean -new born, yet perfect -in all the beauty of glade and fountain, of grassy upland and silver tarn, of marble crag and overhanging wood, sparkling from the brine as after a summer shower. The traditions of every nation have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hidden spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have portrayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time-a serene Eden -an ever-sunny Tempe a vale of Avalon -a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world. -a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite guarded by its knights, girded by impenetrable forests glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, forever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees the path of being to its Source - to reach a simplicity and a rest in which the primal essence of himself will be overshadowed by the immediate presence of the Infinite; and, lost in glory, will love and gaze and know, without the grosser appliances of visible media, beyond the laborious processes of the reason, or the phantasmagoria of the imagination, by a contact above all means or mode," ineffable as Deity itself. But the unnatural ambition defeats itself, and the aspirant, instead of soaring to the empyrean, drifts, buffeted about, in the airy limbo of hallucination. Instead of rising above the infirmities of our nature, and the common laws of life, he becomes the sport of the idlest phantasy, the victim of the most humiliating reäction. 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 "blast 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 recall, 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. To return to Madame Guyon. From the hour of that interview with the Franciscan she was a mystic. The secret of the interior Languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.life flashed upon her in a moment. She had Such was the secret mountain Kinkadulle, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region, now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind- even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual-that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the inystic. He aims, by painfully unclothing his nature of all the integuments of sense, of passion, of imagination, of thought, by threading back been starving in the midst of fulness; God was near, not afar off; the kingdom of heaven was within her. The love of God took pussession 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. purgatory. At that time she felt no doubt concerning the power of the priest to grant Prayer, which had before been so difficult, such absolution, but she thought it wrong to was now delightful and indispensable; hours desire to escape any suffering. She was afraid passed away like moments - she could of resembling those mercenary souls who are scarcely cease from praying. Her trials afraid not so much of displeasing God, as of seemed great no longer; her inward joy con- the penalties attached to sin. She was too sumed, 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. She was then little more than twenty years of age. The ardor 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 sop'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. 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 astonishing 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 much in earnest for visionary sentimentalism. Her efforts manifest a serious practical endeavor 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. In a similar spirit, the Suabian mystic Suso, in the fourteenth century, at length abandoned a course of austerity far more severe, at the suggestion of the famous Tauler. The fact that such inflictions were discontinued, as requisite no longer, shows that their object was discipline, not atonement. Many of those mystics who carried them to the greatest length would have shrunk with horror from the idea of relying on their own sufferings for salvation, instead of, or in addition to, the merits of the Saviour. The rigid self-scrutiny of Madame Guyon was constantly discovering selfishness in what had seemed innocent, pride in what once looked praiseworthy. She was struggling through the mortification of the senses towards the higher mortification of the will. Her aim was totally to lose her own activity; to desire nothing, to do nothing, but from the prompting of the Christ formed within; to substitute God for the annihilated self in the inmost of the soul. Some mystics have carried this so far as to believe that they became themselves a revelation, almost an incarnation of Deity, every thought an inspiration, every act dívine. Madame Guyon was saved from such excesses. Like the more sober Quakers, she was willing that the Outer should direct the Inner Light. But she did not escape the lesser error of frequently mistaking her own impulses for divine monitions, and endeavoring to read in the mysteries of Providence the immediate will of God. With all the mystics she interpreted too literally the language of St. Paul, “I live, yet no more I, but Christ liveth in me.' Situated as Madame Guyon now was, 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 endeavored in everything to please her husband, but he complained that she loved God so much she had no love left for him. She was In this extract she describes strange physiwatched day and night; she dared not stir cal sensations as accompanying her inward from her mother-in-law's chamber or her hus-emotion. The intense excitement of the soul band's bedside. If she took her work apart assumes, in her over-strained and secluded to the window they followed her there to see imagination, the character of a corporeal that she was not in prayer. When her hus-seizure. The sickly frame, so morbidly sensiband went abroad, he forbade her to pray in tive, appears to participate in the supernatural his absence. The affections even of her child influences communicated to the spirit. On were taken from her, and the boy was taught a subsequent occasion she speaks of herself as to disobey and insult his mother. Thus ut- so oppressed by the fulness of the divine manterly alone, Madame Guyon, while apparently ifestations imparted to her, as to be compelled engaged in ordinary matters, was constantly to loosen her dress. More than once some in a state of abstraction; her mind was else- of those who sat next her imagined that they where, rapt in devout contemplation. She perceived a certain marvellous efflux of grace was in company without hearing a word that proceeding from her to themselves. She bewas said. She went out into the garden to lieved that many persons for whom she was look at the flowers, and could bring back no interceding with great fervor, were sensible account of them; the eye of her reverie could at the time of an extraordinary gracious influmark nothing actually visible. When play-ence instantaneously vouchsafed, and that her ing at piquet, to oblige her husband, this spirit communicated mysteriously, "in the "interior attraction" was often more power- Lord," with the spirits of those dear to her fully felt than even when at church. In her when far away. She traced a special interAutobiography she describes her experience vention of Providence in the fact that she as follows: 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. The spirit of prayer was nourished and increased from their contrivances and endeavors 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 recompense, gift, or favor, 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. O, igno- Church of Rome at least had no right to Imaginary as all this may have been, the rance more truly learned than any science of the Doctors, since it so well taught me Jesus Christ brand with the stigma of extravagance any crucified, and brought me to be in love with his such transference of the spiritual to the senholy cross! In its beginning I was attracted with suous, of the metaphysical to the physical. so much force, that it seemed as if my head was The fancies of Madame Guyon in this respect going to join my heart. I found that insensibly are innocent enough in comparison with the iny body bent in spite of me. I did not then monstrosities devised by Romish marvel-moncomprehend from whence it came; but have gers to exalt her saints withal. St. Philip learned since, that as all passed in the will, Neri was so inflamed with love to God as to which is the sovereign of the powers, that at-be insensible to all cold, and burned with such tracted the others after it, and reunited them in a fire of devotion that his body, divinely feverGod, their divine centre and sovereign happiness. ish, could not be cooled by exposure to the And as these powers were then unaccustomed to wildest winter night. For two and fifty years be united, it required the more violence to effect he was the subject of a supernatural palpitathat union. Wherefore it was the more perceived. Afterwards it became so strongly riv- tion, which kept his bed and chair, and everyeted as to seem to be quite natural. This was so thing movable about him, in a perpetual strong that I could have wished to die, in order tremble. For that space of time his breast to be inseparably united without any interstice was miraculously swollen to the thickness of to Him who so powerfully attracted my heart. a fist above his heart. On a post-mortem As all passed in the will, the imagination and the examination of the holy corpse, it was found understanding being absorbed in it, in a union that two of the ribs had been broken to allow of enjoyment, I knew not what to say, having the sacred ardor of his heart more room to never read or heard of such a state as I experi- play! The doctors swore solemnly that the enced; for before this I had known nothing of phenomenon could be nothing less than a the operations of God in souls. I had only read miracle. A divine hand had thus literally "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. The Life of Lady Guion, by Herself; Anon. Trans. 1772, p. 87. enlarged the heart" of the devotee. St. Philip enjoyed, with many other saints, the privilege of being miraculously elevated into the air by the fervor of his heavenward aspirations. And this is the worthy whose worship is revived by our Oratorians, with the famous Dr. Newman at their head, in the nineteenth century. 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 favor 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 ecstasy, 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 odor 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, Maria of Oignys received what the urgic 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. 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. 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 rapt 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. Clara of Montefalco, a saint who died at the beginning of the fourteenth century, had in a vision given her heart to Christ, that it might be crucified. She lived thenceforward in perpetual contemplation of the passion. After death, her heart, which had enlarged to the size of a child's head, was extracted and preserved in a vessel near the altar. With trembling and with tears her sisters of the cloister ventured to open it with a knife. On the right side they 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 instru ments 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. The diocese of Liege 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 over |