t of human
individuality and responsibility. The theory of mere (pure) love
absorbing the soul in God put an end to repentance, effort to withstand
evil, and the need of a Redeemer. Bossuet was not deceived. The
elevation of his mind, combined with strong common sense, caused him to
see through all the veils of the mysticism. Madame Guyon had submitted
her books to him; he disapproved of them, at first quietly, then
formally, after a thorough examination in conjunction with two other
doctors. Madame Guyon retired to a monastery of Meaux; she soon returned
to Paris, and her believers rallied round her. Bossuet, in his anger, no
longer held his hand. Madame Guyon was shut up first at Vincennes, and
then in the Bastille; she remained seven years in prison, and ended by
retiring to near Blois, where she died in 1717, still absorbed in her
holy and vague reveries, praying no more inasmuch as she possessed God,
"a submissive daughter, however, of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman
Church, having and desiring to admit no other opinion but its," as she
says in her will. Bourdaloue calls mere (pure) love "a bare faith, which
has for its object no verity of the gospel's, no mystery of Jesus
Christ's, no attribute of God's, nothing whatever, unless it be, in a
word, God." In the presence of death, on the approach of the awful
realities of eternity, Madame Guyon no doubt felt the want of a more
simple faith in the mighty and living God. Fenelon had not waited so
long to surrender.

The instinct of the pious and vigorous souls of the seventeenth century
had not allowed them to go astray: there was little talk of pantheism,
which had spread considerably in the sixteenth century; but there had
been a presentiment of the dangers lurking behind the doctrines of Madame
Guyon. Bossuet, that great and noble type of the finest period of the
Catholic church in France, made the mistake of pushing his victory too
far. Fenelon, a young priest when the great Bishop of Meaux was already
in his zenith, had preserved towards him a profound affection and a deep
respect. "We are, by anticipation, agreed, however you may decide," he
wrote to him on the 28th of July, 1694: "it will be no specious
submission, but a sincere conviction. Though that which I suppose myself
to have read should appear to me clearer than that two and two make four,
I should consider it still less clear than my obligation to mistrust all
my lights, and to prefer b