carry them through....I could ask nothing for myself nor for
another, nor wish anything but this divine will....I do not
believe that there could be in the world anything more simple
and more unified....It is a state of which one can say nothing
more, because it evades all expression,--a state in which the
creature is lost, engulfed. All is God, and the soul perceives
only God. It has to strive no more for perfection, for growth,
for approach to Him, for union. All is consummated in the unity,
but in a manner so free, so natural, so easy, that the soul
lives from the air which it breathes....The spirit is empty, no
more traversed by thoughts; nothing fills the void, which is no
longer painful, and the soul finds in itself an immense capacity
that nothing can either limit or destroy."

Can we fail to trace in these simple words the shadow of all
religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon
is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed
world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative
worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit.
Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St.
Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the
followers of Buddhism in its various shades, from the Ganges to
the Charles. Two characteristics disengage themselves to view:
the insistence on the unity of God--IN whom alone the Holy
Virgin and the saints are seen--from a psychological point of
view only; and the mind's emptiness of thought in a state of
religious ecstasy. But without further analysis, we may ask,
as the disciples of the mystics have always done, how this
state of blissful union is to be reached. They have always
been minute in their prescriptions, and it is possible to