oman' and 'a distracted enthusiast.'
So much depends upon the greater or less sobriety with which views are
stated; and excellent as Madame Guyon was, her effuse and somewhat
morbid form of devotional sentiment can never be altogether congenial to
English feeling, still less to English feeling such as it was in the
first half of the eighteenth century. But her hymns, made familiar to
readers in this country by Cowper's translations, were received by many
with the same welcome as the works of Madame de Bourignon. If there were
few who could appreciate the high-strung mystic aspirations after
perfect self-renunciation, self-annihilation, and absorption in the
abyss of the Divine infinity, the ecstatic joy in self-denial and
suffering, whereby the soul might be so refined from selfishness as to
surrender itself wholly to the will of God, and to see the marks of His
love equally present everywhere--if to religious men and women outside
the cloister this seemed like vainly striving

To wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky,

yet in the general spirit of her verses they could gain refreshment not
always to be found elsewhere. They could sympathise with the intense
longing for a closer walk with God, with the hunger and thirst after a
purer righteousness, a more unselfish love, a closer mystical union with
the Divine life.

Yet, after all, it is not France, but Germany that has been for many
centuries the chosen abode of every variety of mystic sentiment. The
most exalted forms of spiritual Christianity have prospered there, and,
on the other hand, the vaguest reveries and the grossest epidemics of
fanaticism. We turn from the influence in the England of the eighteenth
century of French revivalists and French Pietists to that exercised by
one of the most remarkable of German mystics, Jacob Behmen. If it was an
influence no longer popular and widely spreading, as it once had been,
yet it directly and profoundly impressed one of the most eminent of our
theologians, and indirectly its effects were by no means inconsiderable.

Behmen's writings (1612-24) travelled rapidly through Europe, found
readers in every class, and are said to have been widely instrumental in
recalling unbelievers to a Christian faith. They popularised and gave an
immense extension to mysticism of every kind, good and bad. In Germany
they largely contributed[510] to form the opinions of Arndt and
Andreas, Spener and Franck