soul, and with spiritual progress just in proportion to the measure of faith. But we ought perhaps to mention here as a defect of this work and of Madame Guyon's experience, if we judge her by rule as a Bible Christian, that the written Word is kept too much in the back-ground, and inward light, providences, and impressions, or what she called inspirations, are more used as a substitute, which they are not, than as an auxiliary, which they are, to the Word of God.

We will not, however, be kept longer from the subject-matter of the work under review. It is said by Madame Guyon on page 52, vol. 2d, of these Religious Opinions and Experience, that,

"During the period of the old Testament dispensations there were several of the Lord's martyrs, who suffered for asserting the existence of the one true God, and for trusting in Him. The doctrine of the one true God in distinction from the heathen doctrine of a multiplicity of gods, was the test by which conflicting opinions were tried... At a later period another great truth was proclaimed, that of Jesus Christ crucified for sinners. This was a truth so much at variance, either in the principle or the facts of the announcement, with men's pre-conceived opinions and feelings that it naturally arrested their attention, and provoked their hostility. And, accordingly, in the primitive times of the Christian church, there were those who suffered, and who shed their blood for this truth. .. At the present time there are those who are martyrs of the Holy Ghost. In other words, there are those who suffer for proclaiming the great truth, than the reign of the Holy Ghost in the souls of men has come; and especially for proclaiming their personal and entire dependence on His divine presence and influence. It is to the doctrine of Pure Love, the doctrine of sanctification, and of the Holy Ghost within us, as the Life of our own life, which is to be the test of spiritual perception and fidelity in the present and in future times. Those who have suffered for the doctrine of Jesus Christ, crucified for the world's sins, have been truly glorious in the reproaches and sorrows they have endured; but those who have suffered, and are destined to suffer for the doctrine of the coming and of the triumphant reign of the Holy Spirit in men's souls, will not be less so. The doctrine of Christ crucified as an atoning sacrifice is essentially triumphant. Satan has ceased, in a great degree, to exercise his power against those who receive and believe it. But, on the contrary, he has attacked, and will attack, both in body and in spirit, those who advocate the dominion of the Holy Spirit, and who feel His celestial impulse and power in their own hearts.

Upon these views, which indicate more than ordinary intellectual insight and discrimination, as well as experimental acquaintance with the things of God, Professor Upham thinks it proper to offer additional explanatory remarks. After commenting upon the doctrines of the Divine Unity and vicarious suffering for sin, he adds,

"But there is another great truth, of which it may at length be said, that Its hour has come ;-namely, that of God, in the person of the inward Teacher and Comforter, dwelling in the hearts of his people, and changing them by his divine operation into the holy and beautiful image of him who shed his

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 as 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