Excellent Women
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Situated as she was, a Protestant without herself suspecting it, and that in the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church; a devout reader of the Bible, and one who valued the ministrations of priests as advisers and "confessors," rather than as transacting the penitent's own work for him, her superior intelligence, and her happy art of carrying conviction to the listeners, raised the jealousy of the clergy, just as her pure life was a silent rebuke to all lax livers, whether monk, nun, or priest. D'Aranthon, the bishop, had welcomed her to his diocese, and at first received her doctrines with appreciative favour. But he was a man easily persuaded, swayed by the last person who talked to him, and as her opinions became more pronounced, he began to perceive that they were dangerous to the stability of the corrupt, priest-ridden Church of which he was an "overseer." He had appointed Father La Combe as Madame Guyon's "director," her spiritual guide and instructor. But in practice the position was reversed, and it was she who led La Combe into higher regions of thought and experience, of which he soon became the eloquent exponent.
La Combe's preaching attracted great attention at Thonon, on the other side of the Lake of Geneva; and the bishop was anxious lest these new doctrines should spread, and he himself should get into trouble at Rome on their account. He now wanted to circumscribe Madame Guyon's sphere of influence by getting her to become prioress of a convent at Gex. He evidently thought that by having her here under some restraint, and by keeping her close to the duties of the cloister, he would be able to put a stop to the propagation of her heretical opinions. But though she gave a little too much heed to visions and dreamy imaginings, she had lost no whit of the practical common-sense and clearness of sight which had distinguished her in many mundane emergencies. She absolutely refused to make over her property for the good of the sisterhood, and would not undertake an office which would shut her up from her mission of proclaiming far and wide, as the Divine Hand opened the way, the message of the Saviour's love and the Holy Spirit's sanctifying power. This refusal brought much persecution and annoyance both to herself and to Father La Combe, who had manfully refused to obey the bishop when he ordered him to use his influence in making Madame Guyon comply with his expressed wishes.
A party was now formed at Gex specially for the persecution of Madame Guyon, and after much annoyance and suffering she felt she was providentially called to leave a town where she had many disciples, whose lives she had been the means of brightening and elevating. In the spring of 1682 she crossed the Lake of Geneva to Thonon, where she pursued the same missionary career, and was the means of raising up a little church of believers in the midst of dense bigotry and superstition. She never "preached" in public, but in private she conversed and prayed with individual seekers after salvation, and at times had conferences with several together in a small room. By these means, and by her excellent letters, she effected an amazing amount of good in all that region. For a time, a short and happy time, all went rightly; but she knew only too well that persecution must ensue. It could not but come to this good woman, who devoutly fulfilled what she esteemed to be the lawful commands of her Church, but who took as her highest authority and director the open Bible, explained not by priest or friar, but by the Holy Ghost working upon her own acute intellect and devout heart. It is worthy of notice that under her guidance several small societies or communities were formed by poor girls who had become decided Christians. These young people helped each other in secular matters, and held little meetings for reading and prayer and loving fellowship. Their associations were soon broken up by the priestly party, as, indeed, was to be expected; the girls were deprived of ordinary church privileges, and some of them were driven out of Thonon altogether. Another indication of the rising tide of persecution was that the dominant party ordered all books relating to the inner life to be brought to them, and publicly burnt in the market-place the few which were given up.
At length, through the influence of her enemies, Madame Guyon received from the bishop notice that she must go out of his diocese, and Father la Combe was similarly warned to depart. All espostulation was in vain, and leaving Savoy, in which her labours had been so much blessed, she set out on a wearisome journey into Piedmont, crossing the perilous Mont Cenis on a mule, and came to Turin.
In spite of many annoyances, she had spent two happy years at Thonon in work for her Divine Master; and she would have been more than human if she had not felt, though in a spirit of sweet resignation, the wrench which these frequent changes of habitation inflicted. No wonder that she called to mind the pathetic words in Matthew viii. 20: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head." "This," she writes,23 "I have since experienced to its full extent, having had no sure abode where I could remain more than a few months, and every day in uncertainty where I should be on the morrow, and besides, finding no refuge, either among my friends, who were ashamed of me and openly renounced me just when there was an outcry against me, or among my relations, most of whom have declared themselves my adversaries and been my greatest persecutors, while the others looked on me with contempt and indignation."
At Turin she found temporary refuge and rest in the house of the Marchioness of Prunai, but appears to have spent only a few months of 1684 in that city. She longed to return to evangelistic work in France. Accordingly in the autumn she went to Grenoble, and had great success in her labours, but, through the hatred of her enemies, was obliged to quit the place secretly, leaving her little daughter in charge of her faithful maid La Gautière. She had already commenced authorship, at Thonon, by writing, during an interval of much-needed rest, her book entitled Spiritual Torrents. At Grenoble she began her commentaries on The Holy Bible, and here she published her famous work, A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, which speedily ran through several editions. So, by word of mouth, and by pen, she taught, and "the new spirit of religious inquiry," as she calls it, spread and prevailed. It was indeed the old spirit of inquiry, as old as the days of the apostles, and its basis was the principle which she clearly enunciates, "that man is a sinner, and that he must be saved by repentance and faith in Christ, and that faith in God through Christ subsequently is, and must be, the foundation of the inward life." Such a bold proclamation of Gospel truth could not but rouse the anger of the clerical party at Grenoble. The persuasive missioner was soon the centre of a storm of wrath and indignation, which the friendly Bishop Camus, afterwards a cardinal, was unable to allay. Early in 1686 she left Grenoble for Marseilles, where she hoped to find refuge for a while. But her fame had preceded her. "I did not arrive in Marseilles," she records, "till ten in the morning, and it was only a few hours after noon when all was in uproar against me."
In this excitable city she remained only eight days; but in that short space some good was effected. Now began a series of wanderings in search of a home. Arriving at Nice, she felt acutely her desolate state. "I saw myself without refuge or retreat, wandering and homeless. All the artisans whom I saw in the shops appeared to me happy in having an abode and refuge." After a stormy voyage to Genoa, she reached Verceil, on the Sessia, and after a stay of a few months amongst kind friends, but precluded from public work by ill-health, she decided to return once more to Paris, and there pursue her labours.
Unaware of the king's despotic intolerance, she arrived in the French capital on July 22, 1686, after an absence of five years, and soon became the centre of an enlightened circle of friends, of high rank, who were glad to listen to her teaching and to learn the way of the Lord more perfectly. For a while all was quiet. But her enemies—among whom her half-brother, Père La Mothe, was ever the most virulent—were meantime very busy, and at length a charge was laid against her before the king. She was seized by warrant of a lettre de cachet, and consigned to solitary imprisonment in the convent of Sainte Marie, in the suburb of St. Antoine. Louis XIV. was now posing as a defender of the faith, and was glad to show his Catholic zeal in the punishment of a lady who was said to hold opinions similar to those of Molinos, whom he had recently induced the Pope to condemn. Nearly four months previously her eloquent disciple, Father la Combe, had been committed to the Bastille for life.
VI.
IN PRISON
On January 29, 1688—the first month of a year specially dear to English lovers of civil and religious liberty—Madame Guyon was taken to her cell in Sainte Marie. It was a room in an upper story of the convent, with a barred door, and an opening for light and air on one side. Here she was shut up from her friends; her gaoler, a crabbed, hard-hearted nun, who treated her with the greatest rigour, regarding her not only as a heretic, but as a hypocrite and out of her senses as well. Feeble in body and in bad health, her mind was much troubled about her beloved daughter, whom interested persons were trying to force into a marriage of which Madame Guyon strongly disapproved. But though, under harsh treatment, she became very ill, and was nigh unto death, her peace and joy proved their heavenly origin by unbroken continuance in this trying season. As she recovered, she found occupation in writing her autobiography, and in composing hymns and sacred poems. Amongst the latter is the charming cantique given at the end of her Life, and beginning—
"Grand Dieu! pour Ton plaisirJe suis dans une cage,"which has been happily Englished as follows:—
"A little bird I am,Shut from the fields of air;And in my cage I sit and singTo Him who placed me there;Well pleased a prisoner to be,Because, my God, it pleases Thee.Nought have I else to do,I sing the whole day long,And He whom well I love to pleaseDoth listen to my song.He caught and bound my wandering wing,But still He bends to hear me sing.Thou hast an ear to hear,A heart to love and bless,And though my notes were e'er so rude.Thou would'st not hear the less,Because Thou knowest, as they fall,That love, sweet love, inspires them all.My cage confines me round,Abroad I cannot fly;But though my wing is closely bound,My heart's at liberty.My prison walls cannot controlThe flight, the freedom of the soul.Oh, it is good to soarThese bolts and bars above,To Him whose purpose I adore,Whose providence I love,And in Thy mighty will to findThe joy, the freedom of the mind."Her liberation from this imprisonment came from a remarkable quarter. Madame de Miramion, a pious lady, often visited the convent with charitable intent. Having heard much about Madame Guyon, she asked to see her; and having seen her and conversed with her, she soon became her warm friend, and pleaded her cause with Madame de Maintenon, who was now at the height of her power and possessed supreme influence with the king, whose wife she had become, by a private marriage, in 1685. Madame de Miramion, having in this way procured Madame Guyon's release from her convent prison, took her to her own house. It was a happy change for this much-tried woman. She was once again among friends, and had the society of her daughter. She went to St. Cyr—a royal institution for the education of the daughters of the poorer aristocracy, in which Madame de Maintenon took interest—to thank the great lady for her kindness. The latter was charmed with the bright, saintly ex-prisoner, whose devout spirit shone out in her countenance and breathed in her fascinating speech. She had many conversations with her, and begged her to give instruction to the girls of St. Cyr.
It was at this time that Madame Guyon first met the great Fénelon, who was a director of St. Cyr, as well as one of the most noted characters of the age. She won his lasting regard. He was cheered by the warmth of her piety and her unwavering faith, while his more logical and better disciplined mind would no doubt moderate and tone down her excess of introspection and rapt emotion. She spent three happy years in Paris, consulted by many persons on religious matters, admired and honoured by several distinguished people, and sheltered from storm in the house of her daughter, now married to the Count de Vaux. But the sunshine was not to last long. Godet, Madame de Maintenon's confessor and one of the directors of St. Cyr, was possessed with a jealous hatred of his co-director, Fénelon, and also disliked Madame Guyon. Breathing into the mind of the great lady—who, though of Huguenot descent, was nothing if not "orthodox"—doubts as to Madame Guyon's correctness of belief, he caused Madame de Maintenon to withdraw her countenance from her protégée, and to discontinue her own visits to St. Cyr. Now was the time for Madame Guyon's enemies to attack her, when they saw the court favourite's countenance withdrawn. An attempt was made to poison her, and so far succeeded that her health was impaired for many years.
Then Bossuet appeared on the scene. In September, 1693, he came to see her in Paris, feeling, doubtless, that he was the man to settle all these Pietistic commotions. At Madame Guyon's request he consented to examine her numerous writings; and when, in the course of some months, he had performed this task, and had also perused her MS. autobiography, he had another long conversation with her, which brought out fully the peculiarities of her doctrine. In this interesting discussion he seems to have adopted a bullying tone somewhat incompatible with his remarkably mild Christian name, Jacques Bénigne, and to have forgotten the courtesy due to a lady who, whatever her errors might be in his eyes, was one of the brightest lights and purest saints in the Roman Catholic Church of that day. Finally, the matter became an affair of State, and the king appointed a commission to sit, at Issy, upon her orthodoxy—Bossuet, De Noailles, and Tronson. The two latter were charmed with her mild and teachable spirit. But the fierce Bossuet was not yet satisfied; and as she put herself under his special direction for a time, he consigned her to a convent at Meaux, and at length required her to sign certain doctrinal articles, and a decree condemning her books. To this last, however, a qualifying clause was appended, to the effect that she had never intended to say anything contrary to the spirit of the Church, not knowing that any other meaning could be given to her words. In fact, while conceding to her Church the right to condemn whatever it did not approve in her tenets, she held much the same position as Galileo when his theory as to the movements of our planet was condemned as heretical, and he capped his enforced retractation with the quiet protest, "E pur si muove." In her letter to her three ecclesiastical judges, dated "in August, 1694," she courageously tells them, "I pray you, my lords, to remember that I am an ignorant woman; that I have written my experiences in all good faith, and that if I have explained myself badly, it is the result of my ignorance. As regards the experiences, they are real."24
Bossuet at length appeared to be satisfied, and gave her a certificate of her filial submissiveness to the Roman Catholic faith, and she thought herself free to return to Paris. It was not perhaps the wisest step to take; the bishop was displeased at it, as was also the bigoted Madame de Maintenon. Madame Guyon went to live in privacy in a small house in the Faubourg St. Antoine, where she hoped to be left in peace. But her enemies got scent of her hiding-place, arrested her, and shut her up in the Castle of Vincennes, whence, after a few weeks at Vaugirard, she was transferred to the Bastille.
Of her life in this famous prison we have little or no detail. Like all its unfortunate inmates, she was forbidden to reveal its secrets; but we gather from her own words that, amid sickness and the many hardships of her prison life, one of her severest trials was found in the rumours which reached her of "the horrible outcry," outside the walls, against herself and her sympathisers. But in this dark season she held fast her confidence in God, and her spirit found utterance and relief in some of those songs, full of love and trust, which are included in the four volumes of her poetical works.
VII.
LAST YEARS
She was confined in the Bastille for four years, and when at last, in 1702, she was released, her health was completely ruined by the privations she had suffered, the bitter cold of winter, and in the warmer weather the poisonous exhalations from the stagnant waters of the moat. When once more she issued into the sweet air of liberty, "My afflicted spirit," she says, "began to breathe and recover itself; but my body was from that time sick and borne down with all sorts of infirmities." Even now, however, she was not free to go where she liked. After a brief visit to her daughter in Paris, she was required to take up her residence at Blois, a hundred miles south-west, and there, in complete retirement, she spent her remaining days, still writing cheery words of counsel to her disciples in France and other lands, and enjoying spells of happy converse with the steadfast friends who sought her out in her exile.
She lived on in peace and quiet, though often in pain and weakness, for fifteen years after her release from the Bastille. Her final release from all earthly trials and sorrows took place on June 9, 1717, when she had entered about three months into her seventieth year. That her beautiful spirit of resignation was maintained to the last, and that her faith was pure and steadfast, we have proof in these expressions in her will, written a short time before her death: "Thou knowest that there is nothing in heaven or in earth that I desire but Thee alone. In Thy hands, O God, I leave my soul, not relying for my salvation on any good that is in me, but solely on Thy mercies and the merits and sufferings of my Lord Jesus Christ."
We find here no trace of that reliance on the Virgin Mary, or that frequent clamouring for her interest and intercession, which then formed and still forms so integral a portion of the daily routine of Romish worship. It is a remarkable feature of Madame Guyon's religious life that, in an idolatrous age, her faith constantly soared straight up to God, ignoring the mediation of the Virgin and the saints, and regarding the priests themselves, not as intermediaries between Christ and her soul, but simply as her appointed counsellors and guides on the road to heaven. We need not wonder that such bitterness was shown towards her, and that no effort was spared to suppress teaching so dangerous to the very foundations of the ancient edifice of error.
VIII.
HER TEACHING
On a previous page I have given extracts from her autobiography which show pretty plainly the mistakes into which Madame Guyon fell at the outset of her Christian career. They had their root in the idea that her communion with God was so close and intimate that all her thoughts were not merely devout and God-ward, but even Divine, coming direct from God. So she fell into the Quietist error of intense introspection, looking for guidance, not solely to the written Word, but chiefly to her own inward impressions, or "inspirations," as she considered them to be.
But was it at all wonderful that this good woman, brought up in the bondage of corrupt doctrine and deeply-incrusted prejudices, should entertain some theological errors? The only wonder is that she attained so much of the truth, and, in that age of mingled intolerance and licentiousness, lived a life of purity and charity, of holy aspirations and devout performance. And though her excessive introspection is not at all to be imitated, and many of her views are such as we with our greater light cannot, of course, endorse, yet her mistakes in metaphysics and in theology did not affect the beauty of her life, which was chiefly spent in acts of charity and earnest endeavours to spread the knowledge of her Lord and Saviour. If her benevolent efforts at evangelisation did not always show the successful results she desired, if disappointments crowded some of her later years, yet to her case we can rightly apply the words of the poet:
"Yet to the faithful there is no such thingAs disappointment; failures only bringA gentle pang, as peacefully they say,'His purpose stands, though mine has passed away.'"Her Works, amounting in all to forty volumes, were published in Paris in several editions. Her Poems and Spiritual Songs occupy four volumes. Some of these simple utterances of a devout heart were beautifully translated by Cowper, and with one of the most characteristic of these renderings this sketch may fitly be concluded:—
"THE ENTIRE SURRENDERPeace has unveiled her smiling face,And woos thy soul to her embrace,Enjoyed with ease, if thou refrainFrom earthly love, else sought in vain.She dwells with all who truth prefer,But seeks not them who seek not her.Yield to the Lord with simple heartAll that thou hast and all thou art;Renounce all strength but strength Divine,And peace shall be for ever thine.Behold the path which I have trod,My path till I go homo to God."WILLIAM NICHOLS.
ANN JUDSON
CHAPTER I.
EARLY YEARS
Ann, a daughter of John and Rebecca Hasseltine, was born in Bradford, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1789. The quiet daily life of the simple New England people from whom she sprang, and amongst whom she was brought up, was as beneficial a training for her future career as could have been found for her. The feverish activity and never-ceasing struggle to be first, which have now taken possession of the American people, were then almost unknown, and the descendants of the Puritan fathers spent their days in peaceful toil. Most of the New Englanders were engaged in farming or small manufactures, and there was a deeply religious spirit throughout the whole of the Northern States.
Of the early life of Ann Hasseltine we know comparatively little. Her family was evidently in moderately easy circumstances, and the Hasseltine household was a happy and closely-united one. The parents, with wise foresight, were careful to give their children as good an education as could be obtained in the neighbourhood, and kept them at school till well advanced in their teens. Ann was distinguished among her sisters for her gay, joyous, and somewhat emotional temperament. There was no half-heartedness about her, and whatever she took up she would throw her whole soul into. As was to be expected in a community where religious matters occupied so prominent a place, the urgent need of a personal faith in Christ was placed before her at an early age. She could not suppress a vague longing after something, she knew not what; and every now and then her conscience would be aroused, and she would quicken her efforts to be good.
When she was sixteen, affairs reached a crisis. A series of religious conferences had been held in Bradford during the early months of 1806, and she regularly attended them. Each meeting deepened the impression on her mind as to the need of a higher life. Her old amusements seemed now utterly distasteful to her, and the fear of being for ever lost weighed heavily on her soul. She was invited to a party by an old friend; but her heart was too sad to care for such things, so on the morning of the party she stole off to the house of one of her aunts, who, she thought, might be able to help her in her trouble. Her aunt spoke seriously to her of the necessity of obtaining salvation while she could, and the poor girl became more downcast than ever. "I returned home with a bursting heart," she afterwards said, "fearing that I should lose my impressions with the other scholars, and convinced that if I did so my soul was lost."
She shut herself in her bedroom, refused to touch any but the plainest food, and for some days pleaded with God for pardon. Gradually the light came in her soul. "I began to discover a beauty in the way of salvation by Christ," she said. "He appeared to be just such a Saviour as I needed. I saw how God could be just in saving sinners through Him. I committed my soul into His hands, and besought Him to do with me what seemed good in His sight. When I was thus enabled to commit myself into the hands of Christ, my mind was relieved from that distressing weight which had borne it down for so long a time. I did not think that I had obtained a new heart, which I had been seeking, but felt happy in contemplating the character of Christ, and particularly that disposition which had led Him to suffer so much for the sake of doing the will and promoting the glory of His Heavenly Father."