ists which she must allow to disappear gradually.
The soul has now God for soul; He is now become her principle of life,
_He is one and identical_ with her.

"In this state nothing extraordinary happens, no visions, revelations,
ecstasies, nor transports. All such things do not belong to this
system, which is simple, pure, and naked, seeing nothing but in God,
_as God sees Himself_, and by His eyes."

Thus, after many immoral and dangerous things, the book ends in a
singular purity, which few mystics have even approached. A gentle new
birth, without either visions or ecstasies, and a sight divinely pure
and serene, is the lot of that soul, which has passed through all the
various shadows of death.

If we listen to Madame Guyon, our life, after having been crushed,
soiled, and destroyed, will revive in God. He who has passed through
all the horror of the sepulchre, whose living body has become a corpse,
which has held communion with worms, and from rottenness has become
ashes and clay--even he will resume his life, and again bloom in the
sun.

What can be less credible, or less conformable to nature? She deceives
herself and us by equivocal terms. The life she promises us after this
death is not our own; our personality extinguished, effaced, and
annihilated, will be succeeded by another, infinite and perfect, I
allow; but still not ours.

I had not yet read the _Torrents_ when all this was, for the first
time, represented to my mind. I was ascending St. Gothard, and had
advanced to meet the violent Reuss that rushes madly down the mountain
in its headlong course. My imagination conjured up, in spite of
myself, the terrible strugglings with which it labours to force its way
through rocks that would hem it in and bar its progress. I was
frightened at its falls and the efforts it seemed to make, like a poor
soul on the rack, to fly from itself, and hide where it might be seen
no more. It writhes at the Devil's Bridge, and, in the midst of its
agony, hurled from an immense height to the bottom of the abyss, it
ceases for a moment to be a river: it becomes a tempest between heaven
and earth, an icy vapour, a horrible frosty blast, that fills the dark
valley with an infernal mist. Mount higher and higher still. You
traverse a cavern, and pass a hollow rock. Lo! the uproar ceases; this
grand battle of the elements is over. Peace and silence reign. And
life?--is it renewed? Do you find a new-birth after thi