On July 22, 1672, the fourth anniversary of the day on which she first found peace, at the suggestion of her correspondent Genevieve Granger, she put her signature and seal to a covenant which that lady had drawn up.  “The contract,” she says,[1] “ran thus:  ’I N. promise to take as my husband our Lord Jesus Christ, and to give myself to Him as His spouse, although unworthy.’  I asked of Him, as the dowry of my spiritual marriage, crosses, contempt, confusion, disgrace, and ignominy; and I prayed Him to give me grace to entertain dispositions of littleness and nothingness with regard to everything else.”  Though we cannot consider such covenants in general as wise in themselves, nor this one in particular as appropriate in its language, yet for a time it seemed to give greater strength to her holy resolutions and increased stability to her pious frame of mind.  But about eighteen months afterwards she fell into a state of depression, or absence of joy, which lasted nearly six years.

[Footnote :1 La Vie de Madame Guyon, premiere partie, ch. xix., 10.]

Probably this state of “privation,” as she terms it, was in great measure the result of physical causes.  She had for many years tried her bodily strength to the utmost by her severe self-denying treatment of herself.  And now the death of her intimate friend, the above-mentioned Genevieve Granger, no doubt exercised a lowering effect on her spirits.  It was a testing time for her faith, and it is a signal proof of the depth and reality of her piety that through all this trying season she held fast her trust in God, and kept on her way, though uncheered for a time by the joyous emotions with which she had so long been favoured.  It was well that her mind, which had been overtaxed and strained by the intensity of her religious fervour, and by its unbroken continuity of introspection, should be brought into a more healthful state by this bitter tonic of joylessness.

In 1676 her husband’s health, never very good, completely broke down, and after a long illness he died, leaving her, at the age of twenty-eight, a widow, with three children.  As the solemn hour of parting drew near, she swept away all the wretched interference which had helped to cloud the happiness of their married life, and, kneeling by his bed, she begged him to forgive anything she had done amiss.  The better nature of the man now at length prevailed, and he said—­what he had never said before—­“It is I who ask pardon of you.  I did not deserve you:”  which was perfectly true.  He left a large amount of property, but his affairs were in a perplexing state of entanglement, and his young widow, unused to business, had to do her best to make all straight.  She proved equal to the occasion, and soon, with her quick perception and uncommon powers of direction and persuasion, she reduced the complicated tangle to order, and then retired to a house of her own, where she was free from the annoying devices of her irreconcilable mother-in-law, and could devote herself to the education of her children, the perfecting of her own education, and the visitation of the sick and poor.