oks a word here and there
upon this dark subject; but no one yet had reached the same depth in
the tomb, that deep pit where the soul is about to be buried. Madame
Guyon indulges in a sort of pleasure, or perseverance, I had almost
said eagerness, to grope still lower, to find, beyond all funereal
ideas, a more definite death, a death more decidedly dead.

There are many things in it, that we should never have expected from a
woman's hand: passion in its transports forgets reserve. This soul,
that is destined to perish, must first be divested, by her divine
lover, of her trappings, the gifts that had ornamented her: he snatches
off her garments, that is to say, the virtues in which she had been
enveloped.--O shame! She sees herself naked, and knows not where to
hide! This is not yet enough; her beauty is taken away. O horror!
She sees she is ugly. Frightened and wandering, she runs and becomes
loathsome. The faster she runs towards God, "the more she is soiled by
the dirty paths she must travel in." Poor, naked, ugly, and deformed,
she loses a taste for everything, understanding, memory, and will;
lastly, she loses together with her will a something or other "that is
her favourite," and would be a substitute for all--the idea that she is
a child of God. This is properly the death at which she must arrive at
last. Let nobody, neither the director nor any other, attempt to
relieve her. She must die, and be put in the ground; be trodden under
foot and walked upon, become foul and rotten, and suffer the stench of
corruption, until rottenness becoming dust and ashes, hardly anything
may remain to testify that the soul ever existed.

What was the soul must, if it still thinks, apparently think that all
it can now do is, to remain motionless in the bosom of the earth. Now,
however, it begins to feel something surprising! Has the sun darted a
ray through a crack in the tomb? perhaps only for one moment? No: the
effect is durable, the dead soul revives, recovers some strength, a
sort of life. But this is no longer her own life, it is _life in God_.
She has no longer anything of her own, neither will nor desire. What
has she to do to possess what she loves? Nothing, nothing, eternally
nothing. But can she have any defects in this state? Doubtless she
has; she knows them, but does nothing to get rid of them: to be able to
do so, she would have to become as before, "thoughtful about herself."
These are little m