refines the spirit and "the agonizing throes of
thought bring forth glory." Often a broken life has produced a single
hymn. It took the long living under trial to shape the supreme
experience.
--The anguish of the singer
Made the sweetness of the song.
Indeed, if there had been no sorrow there would have been no song.
[Illustration: George James Webb]
"MY LORD, HOW FULL OF SWEET CONTENT."
Jeanne M.B. de la Mothe--known always as Madame Guyon--the lady who
wrote these words in exile, probably sang more "songs in the night" than
any hymn-writer outside of the Dark Ages. She was born at Montargis,
France, in 1648, and died in her seventieth year, 1771, in the ancient
city of Blois, on the Loire.
A convent-educated girl of high family, a wife at the age of fifteen,
and a widow at twenty-eight, her early piety, ridiculed in the dazzling
but corrupt society of Louis XIV's time, blossomed through a long life
in religious ministries and flowers of sacred poetry.
She became a mystic, and her book _Spiritual Torrents_ indicates the
impetuous ardors of her soul. It was the way Divine Love came to her.
She was the incarnation of the spiritualized Book of Canticles. An
induction to these intense subjective visions and raptures had been the
remark of a pious old Franciscan father, "Seek God in your heart, and
you will find Him."
She began to teach as well as enjoy the new light so different from the
glitter of the traditional worship. But her "aggressive holiness" was
obnoxious to the established Church. "Quietism" was the brand set upon
her written works and the offense that was punished in her person.
Bossuet, the king of preachers, was her great adversary. The saintly
Fenelon was her friend, but he could not shield her. She was shut up
like a lunatic in prison after prison, till, after four years of dungeon
life in the Bastile, expecting every hour to be executed for heresy, she
was banished to a distant province to end her days.
Question as we may the usefulness of her pietistic books, the visions of
her excessively exalted moods, and the passionate, almost erotic
phraseology of her _Contemplations_, Madame Guyon has held the world's
admiration for her martyr spirit, and even her love-flights of devotion
in poetry and prose do not conceal the angel that walked in the flame.
Today, when religious persecution is unknown, we can but dimly
understand the perfect triumph of her superior soul under suffe
|