It should be said, also, that the Quietists vehemently repudiated the constructions put upon their writings by their enemies, and the evil inferences which were drawn from them. They protested against what others professed to find there as being no part of their real belief. It seems to us that they have a perfect right to be heard in explanation of their tenets, and much allowance must be made for those endeavoring to find expressions that would convey such profound and lofty thoughts. Professor George P. Fisher, in his “History of the Christian Church,” says, “The real ground of hostility to Quietism was its tendency to lead to the dispensing with auricular confession and penances and outward rites altogether.”

It will be sufficiently evident from what has been now written that there is Mysticism and Mysticism; and that that which has the best right to the name lies very close to the most essential truth of the best religion, inseparable from it so far as it is to answer the deepest yearnings of the human heart. If religion is not to be made wholly objective, reduced to a round of external performances, accounted synonymous with philanthropy and morality; if its subjective side is to have proper recognition as the controlling one; if being is to take rank above doing, as we firmly believe it should,—then we are all Mystics in the true sense of the word. Since we have to do with “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” and which must be known by some higher faculty than the understanding; since the new birth is fitly compared by the Master to the mysterious coming and going of the winds of heaven, and can not be completely comprehended by the human reason; since the method of God with the soul of man passes all metes and bounds of man’s finite mind, and the operations of the Holy Spirit can not be wholly fathomed by cold intellect,—Mysticism has extremely close relations with all parts of supernaturalism. It is grounded in a profounder philosophy than those can offer who assume to scout and scorn it. We as Methodists, especially, believe firmly in feeling, and in a first-hand knowledge of God as the privilege of each genuine believer. We hold fast to experience as having rights which logic and dogma must respect; we have exalted life above theory, and the vision divine above dead orthodoxy; we maintain that there is a God-consciousness, as well as a self-consciousness and a world-consciousness; and that spiritual facts can be, and should be, verified in personal experience. We count the words of Pascal divinely true: “The things of this world must be known in order to be loved; but the things of God must be loved in order to be known.”

“Mysticism,” says Professor J. E. Latimer, “has ever been a reaction from formalism and dogmatism in religion. When Christian men have been relying upon the letter, the Mystic has always exalted the spirit. When the Church has been content with mere dogmatic statement and intellectual orthodoxy, a Mystic revival has come to rehabilitate its spiritual life, and sends new streams of power along its arid channel.” Do we not greatly need this revival now? We do not believe there is any special danger to-day from one-sided subjectivity and morbid introspection. The peril is altogether the other way. Our great want is a profounder apprehension of the basal truths of the spiritual life, and their practical translation into individual experience. The knowledge of God is widespread, but it is superficial. Piety is very bustling, but it is not deep. The utterances of the Savior and His apostles are taken at a large discount, and the mass of believers are easily content with a low condition of spirituality. Hence the Church is feeble, and fails to impress itself strongly upon the world. It would be immensely benefited by a large infusion of the spirit of the true Mystic, who wages the most deadly war with all carnality; who has a terrible moral intensity; who renounces absolutely all that dims the radiance or shadows the image of the Perfect One in the mirror of the soul; who is determined, so far as in him lies, to bridge the gulf that separates him from his Maker and make the closest possible approach to God. Of Rabbi Gamaliel, a genuine Mystic, it is reported that he prayed, “O Lord, grant that I may do Thy will as if it were my will, and that Thou mayest do my will as if it were Thy will.” Charles Wesley, another Mystic, is very bold and says,

“Let all I am in Thee be lost,

Let all I am be God.”

Why should it be thought a thing incredible with any that man may become a partaker of the Divine nature? If to a small extent, why not, when all the conditions are favorable, to a very large extent? Why should not the Church in general, and the Methodist Church in particular, get a new grip on this much neglected but every way fruitful truth of the Divine indwelling and the Divine immanence, God in all and all in God, the universe but the will of God expressed in forms of time and space, humanity reaching its highest point of development when it most completely entemples Deity, nature a symbol of God, God revealed in His works? Just so far as this shall be accomplished will the Church swing out into a wealthy place, and march forward to large conquest. Complete surrender will be the prelude to complete possession, and complete possession will straightway be turned into complete victory over every foe.

CHAPTER V.
THE GREAT CONFLICT.

We come now to the central period of Fénelon’s career, that wherein he put forth his greatest mental exertion, fighting, as it were, for his very life, and for that truth which he held much dearer than life. It is a period which every sketch of him, however brief, touches upon, and which we must set forth at some length. The last chapter, on Mysticism and Quietism, will have prepared us to consider somewhat sympathetically the career of Madame Guyon, who was so closely linked with Fénelon during these few years, and who was the chief exponent of the Quietist or Mystic beliefs at this time in France. She was born, as Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe, April 13, 1648, at Montargis, about fifty miles south of Paris, and wedded before she was sixteen, by the arrangement of her parents, to a man of thirty-eight, M. Jacques Guyon, who was very wealthy. She had an unhappy married life, closed by the death of her husband when she was twenty-eight. She had five children, two of whom died in infancy. Suffering was her portion, and religion her consolation, through all her days. When not yet thirteen she read with eagerness the Life of Madame Chantal, Kempis’ “Imitation of Christ,” and the works of Francis of Sales, making a vow at this time to aim at the highest perfection and to do the will of God in everything. Later, when seventeen, this determination was renewed with fuller purpose and intelligence; yet it was not till she was twenty, so limited were her privileges of instruction, that her heart became thoroughly changed, the pleasures of the world put definitely aside, and her life devoted entirely to God. Her education, in a convent, was quite defective, but her natural abilities were very great. She had remarkable powers of conversation, her intellect was keen, her ascendency over other minds, even some of the greatest, in after years was very striking. She learned Latin subsequently, that she might carry on her studies more profoundly. She prepared extensive commentaries on the Scriptures, and her writings, in their collective form, were issued in forty volumes. Afflictions many were used by the Lord to chasten her spirit and deepen her experience. She lost her mother and father, lost a dearly beloved son and darling daughter, lost her beauty by the scourge of smallpox at the age of twenty-two, lost her dearest friend and religious confidante, Genevieve Granger, prioress of the Benedictines, in 1673, and then her husband in 1676.

It was July 22, 1672, that she gave herself to the Lord afresh, with larger comprehension and consecration, without reservation of purpose or time, in the most solemn manner, signing and sealing the following covenant: “I henceforth take Jesus Christ to be mine. I promise to receive Him as a husband to me, and I give myself to Him, unworthy though I am, to be His spouse. I ask of Him, in this marriage of spirit with spirit, that I may be of the same mind with Him—meek, pure, nothing in myself, and united in God’s will; and, pledged as I am to be His, I accept as a part of my marriage portion, the temptations and sorrows, the crosses and the contempts, which fell to Him.” This sacred covenant of the spiritual marriage with her Redeemer, she carefully renewed and reviewed on its anniversary. Especially noticeable was the renewal in 1681, for it took place in Annecy, at the tomb of St. Francis of Sales, who, more than any other human being, was her master in spiritual things, as he has been to hundreds of thousands more. When left a widow with large property interests, she first settled up the affairs of the extensive estate with much skill, without assistance from any one, did much in charity for those around her, looked after her children, and then gradually felt her way to what was to be her life-work in the world. Her spiritual experience all the while was advancing; she was sinking more thoroughly out of self into God. July 22, 1680, was a specially memorable epoch with her, when she began to count the life of nature as fully slain within, when her soul seemed to be delivered from all its chains, and set wholly at liberty, in a way not known before. She says, “I had a deep peace; a peace which seemed to pervade the whole soul; a peace which resulted from the fact that all my desires were fulfilled in God. I desired nothing; feared nothing; willed nothing. I feared nothing; that is to say, I feared nothing considered in its ultimate results and relations, because my strong faith placed God at the head of all perplexities and all events. I desired nothing but what I now have, because I had a full belief that in my present state of mind the results of each moment, considered in relation to myself, constituted the fulfillment of the Divine purposes. I willed nothing; meaning in this statement that I had no will of my own. As a sanctified heart is always in harmony with the Divine providences, I had no will but the Divine will, of which such providences are the true and appropriate expression.”

This extract expresses as well, perhaps, as anything can, the mainsprings of her personal feeling and the chief substance of her teaching. She always beheld the hand of God in all things, recognized practically that God orders and provides every allotment in life, every situation, however distressing to the flesh or perplexing to the perceptions. She looked at everything on the side of God, and found Him always manifested in His providences. She was not merely consecrated to God’s will, she rested in His will, united to it by a most simple faith, finding her joy in Jesus. All that had God in it—and that included everything except sin—was delightful to her. She found the order of Divine providence a very precious and sufficient rule of conduct; for she accounted that every successive second, and every event, however minute, had something about it which made known His will. Hence, trusting fully, and finding God always everywhere, nothing moved her. And she came to feel it to be her special mission, since God had revealed these things to her, as He had not to others, to proclaim this particular kind of holiness; a holiness which was a present privilege and possession, based upon and secured by faith. This interior life, or “inward path,” as she sometimes called it, or state of perfect obedience to the will of God, had still another name by which it came to be widely known—the name of disinterested (or pure, perfect, unselfish) love. By this was meant a love which served God for Himself alone, uninfluenced by fear of punishment or hope of reward.