§ 157.3. =Madame Guyon and Fénelon.=--After her husband’s death, =Madame Guyon=, in company with her father confessor, the Barnabite =Lacombe=, who had been initiated during a long residence at Rome into the mysteries of Molinist mysticism, spent five years travelling through France, Switzerland, Savoy, and Piedmont. Though already much suspected, she won the hearts of many men and women among the clergy and laity, and enkindled in them by personal conference, correspondence, and her literary work, the ardour of mystical love. Her brilliant writings are indeed disfigured by traces of foolish exaggeration, fanaticism and spiritual pride. She calls herself the woman of Revelation xii. 1, and the _mère de la grace_ of her adherents. The following are the main distinguishing characteristics of her mysticism: The necessity of turning away from everything creaturely, rejecting all earthly pleasure and destroying every selfish interest, as well as of turning to God in passive contemplation, silent devotion, naked faith, which dispensed with all intellectual evidence, and pure disinterested love, which loves God for Himself alone, not for the eternal salvation obtained through Him. On her return to Paris with Lacombe in A.D. 1686 the proper martyrdom of her life began. Her chief persecutor was her step-brother, the Parisian superior of the Barnabites, La Mothe, who spread the most scandalous reports about his half-sister and Lacombe, and had them both imprisoned by a royal decree in A.D. 1688. Lacombe never regained his liberty. Taken from one prison to another, he lost his reason, and died in an asylum in A.D. 1699. Madame Guyon, however, by the influence of Madame de Maintenon, was released after ten months’ confinement. The favour of this royal dame was not of long continuance. Warned on all sides of the dangerous heretic, she broke off all intercourse with her in A.D. 1693, and persuaded the king to appoint a new commission, in A.D. 1694, with Bishop =Bossuet= of Meaux at its head, to examine her suspected writings. This commission meeting at Issy, had already, in February, A.D. 1695, drawn up thirty test articles, when =Fénelon=, tutor of the king’s grandson, and now nominated to the archbishopric of Cambray, was ordered by the king to take part in the proceedings. He signed the articles, though he objected to much in them, and had four articles of his own added. Madame Guyon also did so, and Bossuet at last testified for her that he had found her moral character stainless and her doctrine free from Molinist heresy. But the bigot Maintenon was not satisfied with this. Bossuet demanded the surrender of this certificate that he might draw up another; and when Madame Guyon refused, on the basis of a statement by the crazed Lacombe, she was sent to the Bastile [Bastille] in A.D. 1696. In A.D. 1697 Fénelon