The British Quarterly Review (Volume 17) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1853. Excerpt: ... THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. MAY 1, 1853. Art. I.--Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon; together with some account of the Personal History and Religious Opinions of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambray. By Thomas C. Upham, Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in Bowdoin College. 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1851. Jeremy Taylor relates, in one of his sermons, the following legend: --' Saint Lewis the king having sent Ivo, bishop of 'Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholy, with fire in one hand, and water in the other. He asked what these symbols meant. She 'answered, My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God 'without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love 'of God.' This fanciful personage may be regarded as the embodiment of that religious idea to which we give the name of Quietism. It is the ambition of the Quietist to attain a state in which self shall be practically annihilated, --in which nothing shall be desired, nothing feared, --in which the finite nature ignores itself and all creatures, and recognises only the Infinite--is swallowed up and hidden in the effulgence of the Divine Majesty. Quietism attempts self-transcendence by self-annihilation. It calls on man to become Nothing, that he may be dissolved in Him who is All. It has many various names to denote its beloved contrasts of self-emptiness and Divine fulness. That reduction of self to an inappreciable quantity which it inculcates, is called poverty, simplification, denudation, indifference, silence, quiet, death. That self-finding in God which is the immediate consequence of this self-loss, is termed u...