It was in 1680, after nearly seven years of comparative darkness and depression, that her spiritual gloom was broken in upon by a letter from Father La Combe, in which he took the sensible view that by this sore deprivation God was teaching her not to lean on her state of feeling, but to look to Him alone for comfort and strength.  On the 22nd of July—­a day several times marked in her history as one of signal blessing—­her prayers were heard, and God again lifted up the light of His countenance upon her.  “On that happy day,” she writes, “my soul was fully delivered from all its distresses.  It began a new life,” a life of steady peace and joy, guarded from dependence on the joy itself by the painful experience from which she had just emerged.

From this time forth she devoted her life to the spread of the knowledge of the love of God.  After much deliberation and consultation with others, she left Paris in July, 1681, to commence work in the south-east of France.  The preceding winter had been passed in making necessary preparations, in relieving the necessities of the famished poor of Paris, and in other works of charity.

V.

HER PUBLIC WORK.

On that July morning, when Madame Guyon embarked on the Seine secretly, for fear of the interference of her half-brother, she was really embarking on the chief business of her life, the work of spreading the doctrine of inward holiness.  She had felt drawn to the district of Geneva by a desire to give temporal and spiritual help to the poor people at the foot of the Jura range.  And now, having consulted at Paris the Bishop of Geneva, she was making her way, in company with her little daughter, a nun, and two servants, to the little town of Gex.  Passing through Annecy and Geneva, she reached her destination on July 23, and took up her residence at the house of the Sisters of Charity.  This was for a time the centre of her labours of love.  Besides her works of charity, she felt impelled to tell others of the spiritual blessings which she herself enjoyed.

Situated as she was, a Protestant without herself suspecting it, and that in the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church; a devout reader of the Bible, and one who valued the ministrations of priests as advisers and “confessors,” rather than as transacting the penitent’s own work for him, her superior intelligence, and her happy art of carrying conviction to the listeners, raised the jealousy of the clergy, just as her pure life was a silent rebuke to all lax livers, whether monk, nun, or priest.  D’Aranthon, the bishop, had welcomed her to his diocese, and at first received her doctrines with appreciative favour.  But he was a man easily persuaded, swayed by the last person who talked to him, and as her opinions became more pronounced, he began to perceive that they were dangerous to the stability of the corrupt, priest-ridden Church of which he was an “overseer.”  He had appointed Father La Combe as Madame Guyon’s “director,” her spiritual guide and instructor.  But in practice the position was reversed, and it was she who led La Combe into higher regions of thought and experience, of which he soon became the eloquent exponent.