growing popularity of the man whom he had laboured so fiercely and long to crush, and whom he had dared, in spite of his sublime gentleness, to style a ferocious beast, and to accuse him of being another Montanus with his Priscilla. Both Fenelon and Madame Guyon saw him expire some years before them; the one issuing from the Bastile to spend the remainder of her days in peace and pious happiness at Blois, near her daughter; the other falling asleep gently amid his sorrowing people, one of the most eminent examples of a true disciple of a gentle, suffering, and benevolent Saviour, that the world has yet seen.

And what were the doctrines which drew on these distinguished Christian friends this tempest of persecution from the political priests and powers of that day? They were nearly the same which the primitive church held; which Christ taught, and which the Friends hold now: that the essence of religion consists not in ceremonies and dogmas, but in walking in close communion and in humble teachableness with Him who said, 'If any man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.' It was a belief that this visitation of the Son and of the Father is open to every seeking soul; and that in this divine abode with it, they will teach it all heavenly wisdom; and build it up into all truth, and unto everlasting life. That through this communion of God offered to every son of Adam, that state of things shall come to pass when men shall no more seek to men, shall no more say every man to his brother, Know the Lord; for all shall know Him from the least unto the greatest.'

It was this knowledge and communion which Madame Guyon taught and experienced, and which the priests and bishops saw, if allowed to go on, would speedily put an end to their craft, and, therefore, made them begin to cry lustily, Great is Diana of the Ephesians! Madame Guyon was one of the most distinguished writing mediums that ever lived. She declared that whatever she wrote did not proceed from herself, but was given through her hand by the Holy

Spirit. She was equally open to the divine influx in all her thoughts. That influx was the life and substance of her religion. In the language of Wordsworth:

In such access of mind, in such high hour

Of visitation from the living God,

Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.

The following passages from her autobiography are essential Quakerism, as essentially the doctrine of Swedenborg, of Harris, of Wordsworth, of a thousand God-visited souls of holy men and women, as they are essentially the highest form of spiritualism. During my extraordinary sickness. the Lord gradually taught me that there was another manner of conversing among souls wholly His, than by speech. I learnt then a language which before had been unknown to me. I gradually perceived, when Father Lacombe entered, that I could speak no more, and that there was formed in my soul the same kind of silence towards him as was formed in it with regard to God. I comprehended that God was willing to show me that men in this life might learn the language of angels. I was gradually reduced to speak to him only in silence. It was then that we understood each other in God, after a manner unutterable and all divine. At first this was done in a manner so perceptible-that is to say, God penetrated, us with Himself-in a manner so pure and sweet, that we passed hours in this profound silence, always communicative, without being able to utter one word. It was in this that we learned, by our own experience, the operations of the heavenly word to reduce souls into unity with itself, and what purity one may arrive at in this life. It was given me to communicate this way to other good souls, but with this difference, that I did nothing but communicate to them the grace with which they were filled, while near me, in this sacred silence, which infused into them an extraordinary strength and grace, but I received nothing from them; whereas, with Father Lacombe, there was a flow and return of communication of grace, which he received from me, and I from him in the greatest purity.'

Here we see the same laws of mediumship operating in the divine element, as in the mesmeric. Madame Guyon, as the fuller vessel of divine life, which she calls grace, communicated this to the less-developed souls around her. She perceived virtue go out of her as Christ did when touched on earth; but with Father Lacombe, a spirit as richly developed and life-charged, she felt no mere outflowing, but flux and reflux, as of a divine sea.

6

'All those,' she continues, who are my true children, are drawn in their minds at once to continue in silence when with me; and I have the like tendency to impart to them in silence what God gives me for them. In this silence I discover their wants and failings, and communicate to them in an abundant plenitude, according to their necessities. When once they have tasted of this manner of communication, every other becomes burthensome to them. As for me, when I make use of speech, or the pen, with souls, I do it only on account of their weakness, and because either they are not pure enough for the interior communication, or because it is yet needful to use condescension, or for the regulation of outward affairs. It was in this ineffable silence that I comprehended the manner in which Jesus Christ communicated Himself to His most familiar friends, and the communication of St. John, when leaning on his Lord's bosom at the supper of the Passover. It was not the first time that he had seated himself that way, and it was because he was most proper to receive those communications, being the disciple of love. I began to discover, especially with Father Lacombe, that the interior communication was carried on, even when he was afar off, as well as when he was near. Sometimes our Lord made me stop short when in the midst of my occupations, and I was favoured with such a flow of grace, as that which I felt when with him— which I have also experienced with many others, though not in a like degree; but more or less feeling their infidelities, and knowing their faults by inconceivable impressions, without ever having been mistaken therein.'

TRUE SPIRITUAL DEVELOPEMENT.

321

It was for the experience and the teaching of this great doctrine of Christ and the early Church that Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Father Lacombe, Michael Molinos in Spain, and the Friends in England, were so furiously persecuted by people who bore the outer name of Christians without a knowledge of its inner life. And how little do religious professors of to-day understand this spiritual developement, by which souls are opened to the impulse of the spirit-life around them, by which God and his ministering spirits can operate upon and communicate with them, and by which the wealth of the invisible world becomes accessible to incarnated spirits. By which, as George Fox said, 'States can be discerned,' and 'the infallible guide' be followed as confidently as a child follows the guiding hand of a father; a state in which Wordsworth says of his Wanderer :—

No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request,
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power
That made him; it was blessedness and love!

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PROPHETS OF THE CEVENNES.

IN

They, the Cevennois, had many among them who seemed qualified in a very singular manner to be the teachers of the rest. They had a great measure of zeal without any learning; they scarce had any education at all. I spoke with the person who, by the queen's order, sent me among them to know the state of their affairs. I read some of the letters which he brought from them, full of a sublime zeal and piety: expressing a courage and confidence that could not be daunted. -Testimony of Bishop Burnet to the Prophets of the Cevennes.'-' His Own Times,' vol. iv. p. 159.

N most of our English histories we come upon slight and passing notions of certain insurrections in the the Cevennes, a mountain region of the south of France, against the oppression of Louis XIV., to which some aids of money, arms, and men, were sent by the government of Queen Anne, but which never reached the insurgents in question. These insurgents were Protestants, and, therefore, deemed worthy of the sympathies of Protestants; but we learn little from such histories of the results of this sympathy. We find, however, that a number of those insurgents made their way to this country. That they professed to be prophets; to be divinely inspired by the Holy Ghost, and to be enabled by the Divine Spirit to perform miraculous acts, like the members of the primitive church. This pretension, we learn, immediately startled and disgusted the English Church of that day, both Established and Dissenting; a loud cry was raised against these French Protestants as fanatics. The Bishop of London called the attention of