CHAPTER V.

HYMNS OF SUFFERING AND

TRUST.

One inspiring chapter in the compensations of life is the record of immortal verses that were sorrow-born. It tells us in the most affecting way how affliction refines the spirit and "the agonizing throes of thought bring forth glory." Often a broken life has produced a single hymn. It took the long living under trial to shape the supreme experience. -The anguish of the singer

Made the sweetness of the song.

Indeed, if there had been no sorrow there would have been no song.

"MY LORD, HOW FULL OF SWEET CONTENT.”

Jeanne M. B. de la Mothe-known always as Madame Guyon- the lady who wrote these words in exile, probably sang more "songs in the night" than any hymn-writer outside of the Dark Ages. She was born at Montargis, France, in 1648, and

died in her seventieth year, 1771, in the ancient city of Blois, on the Loire.

A convent-educated girl of high family, a wife at the age of fifteen, and a widow at twenty-eight, her early piety, ridiculed in the dazzling but corrupt society of Louis XIV's time, blossomed through a long life in religious ministries and flowers of sacred poetry.

She became a mystic, and her book Spiritual Torrents indicates the impetuous ardors of her soul. It was the way Divine Love came to her. She was the incarnation of the spiritualized Book of Canticles. An induction to these intense subjective visions and raptures had been the remark of a pious old Franciscan father, "Seek God in your heart, and you will find Him."

She began to teach as well as enjoy the new light so different from the glitter of the traditional worship. But her "aggressive holiness" was obnoxious to the established Church. "Quietism" was the brand set upon her written works and the offense that was punished in her person. Bossuet, the king of preachers, was her great adversary. The saintly Fenelon was her friend, but he could not shield her. She was shut up like a lunatic in prison after prison, till, after four years of dungeon life in the Bastile, expecting every hour to be executed for heresy, she was banished to a distant province to end her days.

Question as we may the usefulness of her pietistic books, the visions of her excessively exalted

moods, and the passionate, almost erotic phraseology of her Contemplations, Madame Guyon has held the world's admiration for her martyr spirit, and even her love-flights of devotion in poetry and prose do not conceal the angel that walked in the flame.

Today, when religious persecution is unknown, we can but dimly understand the perfect triumph of her superior soul under suffering and the transports of her utter absorption in God that could make the stones of her dungeon "look like jewels." When we emulate a faith like hers-with all the weight of absolute certainty in it-we can sing her hymn:

My Lord, how full of sweet content

I

pass my years of banishment.
Where'er I dwell, I dwell with Thee,
In heaven or earth, or on the sea.

To me remains nor place nor time:
My country is in every clime;

I can be calm and free from care

On any shore, since God is there.

And could a dearer vade mecum enrich a Christian's outfit than these lines treasured in memory?

While place we seek or place we shun,

The soul finds happiness in none;

But, with a God to guide our way,

'Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Cowper, and also Dr. Thomas Upham, translated (from the French) the religious poems of Madame Guyon. This hymn is Cowper's translation.