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 before them those of a bishop such as you.  You have only to give me my lesson in writing; provided that you wrote me precisely what is the doctrine of the church, and what are the articles in which I have slipped, I would tie myself down inviolably to that rule.”  Bossuet required more; he wanted Fenelon, recently promoted to the Archbishopric of Cambrai, to approve of the book he was preparing on Etats d’Oraison (States of Orison), and explicitly to condemn the works of Madame Guyon.  Fenelon refused with generous indignation.  “So it is to secure my own reputation,” he writes to Madame de Maintenon, in 1696, “that I am wanted to subscribe that a lady, my friend, would plainly deserve to be burned with all her writings, for an execrable form of spirituality, which is the only bond of our friendship?  I tell you, madame, I would burn my friend with my own hands, and I would burn myself joyfully, rather than let the church be imperilled.  But here is a poor captive woman, overwhelmed with sorrows; there is none to defend her, none to excuse her; they are always afraid to do so.  I maintain that this stroke of the pen, given by me against my conscience, from a cowardly policy, would render me forever infamous, and unworthy of my ministry and my position.”  Fenelon no longer submitted his reason and his conduct, then, to the judgment of Bossuet; he recognized in