My sleep is sometimes broken--a sort of half sleep; but my soul seems to be awake enough toknow God, when it is hardly capable of knowing anything else." T. C. Upham: The Life andReligious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.
[160] I have considerably abridged the words of the original, which is given in Edwards'sNarrative of the Revival in New England
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The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more ecstatic than this. "Oftenthe assaults of the divine love," it is said of the Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere, "reduced heralmost to the point of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. 'I cannot support it,' sheused to say.
'Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the violence of your love.'"[161]
[161] Bougaud: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894
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Lectures XIII SAINTLINESS
Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit of saintliness, andhave always been reckoned essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the kindsof service which the. Brotherly love would follow logically from theassurance of God's friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an immediateinference from that of God's fatherhood of us all. When Christ utters the precepts: "Love yourenemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them whichdespitefully use you, and persecute you," he gives for a reason: "That ye may be the children ofyour Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, andsendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." One might therefore be tempted to explain both thehumility as to one's self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual excitement, asresults of the all-leveling character of theistic belief. But these affections are certainly not merederivatives of theism. We find them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highestpossible degree. They HARMONIZE with paternal theism beautifully
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