"These sermons made such an impression on my mind, and absorbed me so strongly in God, that I could not open my eyes nor hear what was said." "To hear Thy name, O my God, could put me into a profound prayer....I could not see any longer the saints nor the Holy Virgin outside of God; but I saw them all in Him, scarcely being able to distinguish them from Him....I could not hear God nor our Lord Jesus Christ spoken of without being, as it were, outside of myself [hors de moi]....Love seized me so strongly that I remained absorbed, in a profound silence and a peace that I cannot describe. I made ever new efforts, and I passed my life in beginning my prayers without being able to carry them through....I could ask nothing for myself nor for another, nor wish anything but this divine will....I do not believe that there could be in the world anything more simple and more unified....It is a state of which one can say nothing more, because it evades all expression,--a state in which the creature is lost, engulfed. All is God, and the soul perceives only God. It has to strive no more for perfection, for growth, for approach to Him, for union. All is consummated in the unity, but in a manner so free, so natural, so easy, that the soul lives from the air which it breathes....The spirit is empty, no more traversed by thoughts; nothing fills the void, which is no longer painful, and the soul finds in itself an immense capacity that nothing can either limit or destroy." Can we fail to trace in these simple words the shadow of all religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit. Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St. Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the followers of Buddhism in its various shades, from the Ganges to the Charles. Two characteristics disengage themselves to view: the insistence on the unity of God--IN whom alone the Holy Virgin and the saints are seen--from a psychological point of view only; and the mind's emptiness of thought in a state of religious ecstasy. But without further analysis, we may ask, as the disciples of the mystics have always done, how this state of blissful union is to be reached. They have always been minute in their prescriptions, and it is possible to derive therefrom what may be called the technique of the mystic procedure.