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Life, religious opinions, and experience of madame de la Mothe Guyon
Life religious opinions and experience of madame de la Mothe Guyon Author:Thomas Cogswell Upham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: their holiness, than I could consider the sun's rays as existing distinct from the sun itself, and living and shining by virtue of their own power of life. This ... more »was true of the greatest saints. I could not see the saints, Peter, and Paul, and the Virgin Mary, and others, as separate from God, but as being all that they are, from Him and in Him, in oneness. I could not behold them out of God ; but I beheld them all in Him." CHAPTER VIII. Of the very marked and decisive nature of her conversion—Ceases to conform to the world in her diversions and modes of dress—Birth of her second son—Her views of providence in connexion with her position in life—Of the discharge of her duty to her family and to others—Her great kindness and charity to the poor—Her efforts for the preservation of persons of her own sex—Her labours for the conversion of souls—Conversation with a lady of rank—Happy results—Domestic trials—Un- kiudness of her stepmother and of her maid-servant—Partial alienation of her husband's affections—Conduct of her eldest son—Her solitary state. Madame Guyon dates this great change as taking place on Magdalen's day, the 22d of July, 1668 She was then a little more than twenty years of age. The change experienced in the transition from the life of nature to the life of God in the soul, is very different in different persons. In the case of Madame Guyon, slowly progressive in its preparatory steps, it was very decisive and marked at the time of its actually taking place. It was obviously a great crisis in her moral and religious being,—one in which the pride and obstinacy of the natural heart were broken down, and in which, for the first time, she became truly willing to receive Christ alone as her hope of salvation. A gospel change implies the existence of a new nat...« less