Reflections on
the Life of
Madame Jeanne de la Mothe Guyon.
[She attends] religious services at the church of Notre Dame in Paris. On her way thither she has an extraordinary interview with a person unknown. His advice to her.
It was at this period of her personal history, that [Madame Guyon] began to have a more distinct and realizing perception of what is implied in a sanctified life. Some portions of her reading, as well as her personal experience, had been favorable to this result. In the Life of Madame de Chantal, which she had read with great interest, she found the doctrine of holiness, so far as it may be supposed to consist in a will subjected to God, and in a heart filled with love, illustrated in daily living and practice, as well as asserted as a doctrine. The writings of Francis de Sales are characterized, in distinction from many other devout writings of the period in which he lived, by insisting on continual walking with God, on the entire surrender of the human will to the divine, and on the existence of pure love. The writings of this devout and learned man seem to have been her constant companions through life. The Imitation of Christy generally ascribed to Thomas a Kempis, Another of the works with which she was familiar, is animated by the same spirit of high Christian attainment. All these writers, in different ways and under different forms of expression, agree in strenuously teaching, that the whole heart, the whole life should be given to God; and that in some true sense this entire surrender, not excluding, however, a constant sense of demerit and of dependence on God, and the constant need of the application of Christ's blood, is in reality not less practicable than it is obligatory.
