roughly representative of a pure and refined mysticism. He is,
indeed, singularly free from the various errors which closely beset its
more exaggerated forms. Yet no admirer of his who had become at all
penetrated with the spirit that breathes in his writings could fail to
sympathise with the fundamental ideas common to every form of mystic
theology. An age which abhorred enthusiasm might have found,
nevertheless, in the author whom all extolled, opinions closely
analogous to those by which the wildest fanatics had justified their
extravagances. The doctrines of an inner light, of perfection, of reason
quiescent amid the tumult of the soul, of mystical union, of
disinterested love, are all strongly maintained by the Archbishop of
Cambray. He wrote his 'Maximes des Saints' with the express purpose of
showing how, in every age of the Church, opinions identical with those
held by himself and Madame Guyon had been sanctioned by great
authorities.[507] It was, in fact, a detailed defence of the Quietism
and moderated mystical views which had excited the violent and unguarded
attack of Bossuet.

Fenelon, with instinctive ease, escaped the pitfalls with which his
subject was encompassed; but it was not so with Madame Guyon, whose
opinions he had so vigorously defended and all but identified with his
own. There could scarcely be a better example of the insensible degrees
in which, by the infirmity of human nature, sound spiritualism may
decline into visionary fancies and a morbid state of religious emotion,
than to notice how the writings of Guyon and Bourignon form transitory
links between Fenelon and the extreme mystics. Their principles were the
same, but the meditations of Madame Bourignon, although sometimes ranked
in devotional value with those of A Kempis and De Sales, fell, if Leslie
and others may be trusted,[508] into most of the dangerous and heretical
notions into which an unreined enthusiasm is apt to lead. A defence of
her opinions, published in London in 1699, and a collection, which
followed soon after, of her translated letters, had considerable
influence with many earnest spirits[509] who chafed at the coldness of
the times, and cared little for other faults so long as they could find
a religious literature in which they could, at all events, be safe from
formalism and scholastic or sectarian disputings.

Lyttelton, in the same paper in which he pronounces his panegyric on
Fenelon, calls Madame Guyon a 'mad w