blood for them. Christ, received by faith, came into the world to save men from the penalty of sin; but it has not been so fully understood, at least not so fully recognized, that he came also to save them from sin itself.

In announcing the coming of the dispensation of the Holy Ghost, in proclaiming the doctrine of entire sanctification, some have already suffered, and others may perhaps suffer in time to come. There will be opposition from its enemies, and mistakes made by its friends. Happy will it be if its friends shall remember that it is a kingdom which comes without observation. It is those in whom this divine kingdom is set up, whom Christ describes as the "little ones; men who move humbly and quietly in the sphere in which Providence has placed them; the meek ones of the earth. The light which shines in their example, illuminates without attracting attention; like that of the sun which scarcely receives our notice, while meteors are gazed at with astonishment. They are the men who "resist not evil;" men that cast all their cares upon Him "who careth for them;" men who hold communion with God in that divine silence of the mind, which results from sins forgiven, from passions subdued, and from faith victorious. Behold here the dominion of the Holy Ghost, the triumph of the true millenium, the reign of holy love!"

Now here would seem to be either the annunciation of a new truth, or the re-annunciation in a new way of an old one fallen into disuse and disbelief, or it is a familiar and everywhere acknowledged truth disguised in mask, like a common man unrecognized in holiday or ball dress. And it is an important question, which is it? or is it either? Is it a truth at all? If it be a truth that the Holy Ghost has come to put away all sin, and to establish the reign of perfect love, and make men entirely holy in this life, then let it be inculcated and made the most of, and let us get the good of it. If it be not a truth, let its falsehood or erroneousness be logically proved, let the garb of sanctity in which it is clothed be stripped off, its true character unveiled, its disastrous tendencies and effects be calmly set forth, and let the ministry and the church be put on their guard against this danger, come in what shape it may, of expecting or believing possible, on earth, the reign of perfect love, or in the church a general or even individual deliverance from sin in this life.

Upon this phase of doctrine now fairly up for consideration by the church in one form or another, a clear light streams from the life and writings of Madame Guyon; and we cannot but suggest, in view of her remarkable and yet very natural experience, at the time of, and soon after her conversion, how rational it is for the lately regenerated soul, in the glow of its first love, and the peace and joy following its first exercises of holiness, to believe that this will be perpetual, and that the victory now obtained over sin, and the conscious rectification of character now begun, will be permanent. And it is just as natural to ask if, with proper religious instruction upon the philosophy of sanctification, that legitimately born hope of the young Christian need be disappointed? Or is it rather a necessity of human nature after regeneration, to relapse into, and be subject again to sin? Perhaps

the experience detailed in these volumes, though we are far from holding it up to be imitated as a perfect type or model of the Christian life, may shed light upon these important questions; which we therefore proceed to give by way of elimination here and there, though it carry us out of the old wheel-rut of an ordinary review.

The highly intellectual character of the authoress in question, the number and influence of her published works, comprising forty volumes in French, the ascendancy given her by superior powers, accomplishments, and beauty of person, the extent of her private influence and associations, the part she had in moulding the opinions and character of some of the leading men of the age of Louis Fourteenth, her intimacy with Fenelon, her controversy with the celebrated Bossuet, the revivals of religion that ensued in the bosom of the church wherever she labored in Catholic France, constituting a series of phenomena that make an important chapter in ecclesiastical and humanomental history, together with the reverence of posterity for her great virtues and piety, and the respectable auspices under which these memoirs are now ushered before the American public, so naturally justify an extended review of these volumes, that it can hardly be deemed otherwise than strange and anomalous that it should not yet have been undertaken in any of the religious or literary circles. Perhaps it is that in some theological quarters the non-committal, subrosa principle is the one too much urged and acted upon; while in others the conservative counsel stare super vias antiquas, is full often enforced to the stifling of inquiry and quenching the glowing embers of original thought sub cinere doloso.

It were well if the same could be said of all our magnates in theology, (a science, surely, wherein progress is not impossible,) which has been attributed of late, in a very masterly criticism, we do not say how truly, to Daniel Webster as a statesman, that his perceptions, feelings, reasonings, tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it; the youngest men in the nation looking to him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the future, and no one ever being able to say, that he is before Webster. "In most men," says the critic, "that intellectual susceptibility by which they are capable of being reacted upon by the outer world, and having their principles and views expanded, modified, or quickened, does not outlast the first period of life; from that time they remain fixed and rigid in their policy, temper, and characteristics; if a new phase of society is developed it must find its exponent in other men. But in Webster this fresh sug

*This was prepared for the Repository before the publication of a late review in the Methodist quarterly.

gestive sensibility of the judgment, has been carried on into the determined and matured wisdom of manhood."

Now it is this same "fresh suggestive sensibility of judgment," open to conviction, adoptive of truth from any and every quarter, surveying all things with the armed philosophic eye, enlarging to the vast, contracting to the minute, collecting images and illustrations from all, and always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it; it is this that is no less desirable for the divine than or the statesman. It is a great mistake for theologians to be opposed to progress, or afraid of the times, or to manage as if truth needed policy, or stratagem, or licensings, and to wear out a long quarantine, and get practique at a regular health office, or free papers and a diploma from the schools, in order to be successful. It was one of Milton's best sayings, "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we injure her to misdoubt her strength! Let truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?"

Let us then do our best to clear the way to an open field and a fair encounter for the truth contained in these very instructive volumes. If we can but ring a bell whose trembling peal shall awaken only one great and good mind to listen to the modest but truthful instructions herein conveyed; or if we can hereby hold a candle for but one earnest seeker after truth, we shall more than have our reward. It will be no fault of the editor, if this work does not have a wide circulation; for he has not merely exhumed the mummery of a Romish saint, and held it up in its grave clothes, or in the embalming cerements that were the fashion of the times; but he has raised the dead, he has brought Madame Guyon herself to life again with all her attractive beauty as natural as if she had never been translated; so that we hear her speaking in our own tongue, divinely discoursing again upon holiness, and serenely acting her part once more upon the stage of life. Professor Upham has done for her what Carlyle, in so masterly a manner, has done for Cromwell. He has re-produced the holy French woman as the Scotch essayist has the heroic Puritan man of the same period. And thereby they are both now living over again in the revolutions of modern society and opinions, and doing their life-work for truth and religious liberty in an age that better appreciates and understands them, than that before which, as hath been said of Milton, they strode so far as to be dwarfed in the distance.

If all the mystics could have as kind and self-interpreting an editor, writing out what they meant, not merely what they said, as Madame Guyon has found in Professor Upham, doubtless a very useful body of truth might become the available property of the church and of humanity in general. And as the editor's

studies and investigations have led that way, and form the catalogue of works consulted in editing these volumes, it is fair to suppose he must have obtained a good degree of familiarity with the best writers of this class; it is natural to suggest that he might be doing a useful service to skim the cream of them into another book. What queen Catharine said of Griffith in view of his estimate of the fallen Woolsey, any one of the mystic writers redivious might with a little variation, say of Professor Upham, so kindly modernizing and translating them:

After my death I wish no other herald,

No better construer of my hidden words,
To keep mine honor from corruption,

Than such an honest chronicler as Griffith.

In saying this we would by no means intimate that the present editor has done anything over and above an editor's duty, which properly understood, is something more, certainly, than digging up a writer's fossil remains, or putting his entire skeleton together with wires. A covering of flesh and decent apparel are quite necessary as a back-bone to constitute naturalness and symmetry.

Let us now attempt to daguerreotype a bird's-eye glance at the life and writings of Madame Guyon, arresting especially those lines of light which are reflected from her peculiar views and experience of Sanctification by Faith. In the early religious history of this remarkable woman, as detailed in her invaluable autobiography, it is most interesting to observe (aside from her providential possession of a Bible in the Dominican Convent where she was a pupil), what an important mission was fulfilled by a kernel of seed-corn dropped from the granary of Protestant truth in England, and planted by the providence of God in the house of Madame Guyon's father. This was in the person of a pious English lady, one of God's hidden ones, to whom, in her destitution, the benevolence of M. De La Mothe offered a home, little thinking of the service she would be to his beloved daughter in her eager pursuit of the pearl of great price. It was through the conversation of this devout lady in exile, perhaps a genuine Puritan, that the youthful Madedmoiselle De La Mothe received the first intimation that "she was seeking religion by a system of works without faith."

Another of the Divine instrumentalities brought to bear upon her, while "feeling after God if haply she might find him," was her religious intercourse with a pious kinsman, De Toissi, who seems to have been one of those exceptive instances of a truly spiritual and heavenly-minded ecclesiastic of the Romish church. She says of him and the exiled lady under her father's roof, that "they conversed together in a spiritual manner," which seems to

have arrested and wrought upon her young heart yearning after holiness, very much as that talk did upon Bunyan, which he overheard one day between three or four poor women," sitting at a door in the sun in one of the streets of Bedford, talking about the things of God." "Methought," he says, "they spake as if joy did make them speak, they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world; as if they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned among their neighbors. At this I felt my own heart began to shake," &c.

So felt young Madame Guyon, (for she was now married at the age of sixteen,) under the conversations of her pious kinsman in his visit at her father's house, and many were the tears she shed when he departed. Still a cloud hung over the way of salvation by faith alone for more than a year; which was at length lifted, in the providence of God, by the word of a devout Franciscan, whose counsel she sought at his cell in company with a kinswoman. Those memorable words were: "Your efforts have been unsuccessful, Madame, because you have sought without what you can only find within. Accustom yourself to keep God in your heart, and you will not fail to find him." To this panting fawn, flying with pierced sides from the world and sin, she knew not where, these few and mystical, perhaps to ordinary inquirers hazardous words, uttered in God's moment of mercy, were like the voice which thundered from Pilate's stair-case in the ears of Luther, The Just shall live by faith. Although far from being the instruction which it seems to us evangelical teachers now would be warranted in giving in such a case, yet, couched as it was in peculiar phraseology, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it evidently had the same effect upon Madame Guyon that the Scripture had upon the mind of the Reformer; and the result proved that this was a genuine conversion, wonder or cavil as we may, that the type of it was not after the stereotype plate of certain rigid theologians, who would even clinch the Holy Spirit to their dead rules of uniformity, and are loath to allow the reality of a conversion unless it be all in their own way.

"Having said these words," she says, "the Franciscan left me. They were to me like the stroke of a dart, which pierced my heart asunder. I felt at this deeply wounded with the love of God;—a wound so delightful, that I desired it never might be healed. These words brought into my heart what I had been seeking so many years. Oh, my Lord! thou wast in my heart, and demanded only the turning of my heart inward, to make me feel thy presence. Alas, I sought thee where thou wast not, and did not seek thee where thou wast! It was for want of understanding these words of thy gospel: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they Lo! here, or lo! there, for behold the kingdom of God is within you."

say

6.

I told this good man that I did not know what he had done to me; that my THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. 4. 4