Letters of Madam Guyon

by Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon

Let me urge you, my child, to enlarge your heart; or, rather, suffer it to become enlarged by grace. This contraction shuts you up in yourself, and hinders an agreeable openness which we should ever maintain, even towards those who have no particular affinity with ourselves. An open, frank exterior wins confidence. Let it not appear, that you have so much relish for yourself, as not to think of others. What seems to us a virtue is sometimes regarded by God as a fault; and which we shall so perceive, when we have clearer light.

You seem to mark out for yourself a certain sphere, and if you go beyond it, you think you do yourself an injury. Thus, while you have an apparent movement, you are only describing a circle, whose centre and circumference is self. I entreat you, pass beyond the narrow bounds of self;—suffer yourself to be led out of self into the will and way of God. Thus you will be much more happy and useful. If I loved you less, I should be less severe.

Let God be the sovereign Master over our hearts, and instruct, and reprove, and operate in us, by himself, or through others, as pleases him.

Adieu. God bless you, my child.

SECRET OF DIVINE OPERATIONS UPON THE SOUL.

Do not suppose, Dear Sir, that you are to be purified by great trials and extraordinary events. All is accomplished in you by the suppleness of your will,—by the state of infancy. It must be so on account of the pride of your natural reason. God conducts the soul in a way opposed to human philosophy. Hence the necessity of being reduced to the state of infancy, and to the subjection of the will. What we call the death of the will, is the passage of our will into the will of God. This change implies not only a change in externals, but the inward subjection of the desires and sentiments of the heart. Here most persons, who commence the religious life, stop short. They cannot submit to the interior crucifixion, which lays prostrate the whole of the natural carnal life, and consequently there follows a mingling of the spirit of the flesh with grace, and it is this which produces such monsters in the religious world. Do we not read in Scripture, that in consequence of the alliance of the sons of God with the daughters of men, giants were born, who so filled the earth with wickedness, they drew down a deluge of wrath upon the world? It is from this abominable alliance of the flesh with the spirit, that all those who appear in the world, as "mighty men, men of renown," are produced and sustained. One may be full of the natural life, while apparently dead to the external things of the world. Thus they are dead to inferior things, and alive in the most essential points—dead in name, but not in reality.

By an authority as gentle as efficacious, God accomplishes his will in us, when we have surrendered our souls to him. The consent we give to his operations, and our relish of them, is sweet and sustaining, in proportion to the perfection of our abandonment. God does not arrest the soul with violence. He adjusts all things in such a manner, that we follow him happily, even across dangerous precipices. So good is this Divine Master, so well does he understand the methods of conducting the soul, that it runs after him, and makes haste to walk in the path he orders.

Suppleness of soul is, therefore, of vital consequence to its progress. It is the work of God to effect this. Happy are the souls, who yield to his discipline. God renders the soul, in the commencement, supple to follow illuminated reason; afterwards to follow the way of faith. He then conducts the soul by unknown steps, causing it to enter into the wisdom of Jesus Christ which is so different from all its former experience, that without the testimony of divine filiation, which remains in the soul in a manner hidden, and the ease and liberty the soul finds in this unknown way, it would consider itself as being separated continually from God, being left, as it were, to act of itself. Human wisdom being here lost, and the powers of the soul controlled by the wisdom of Jesus Christ, born in the soul, it increases in its proportions, even unto the stature of a perfect man in Christ Jesus.

The soul, having now passed into God, is in its proper place, and will be happy, provided it remains fixed and separate from its former manner of acting.