thirty-seven years, and ended only by death in 1703, one year after Madame Guyon was released."

On leaving the Bastile, Madame Guyon retired to Blois, where she lived with her daughter, the Marquise de Vaux. While still in full communion with the Catholic Church she continued with glowing enthusiasm the work of piety and charity to which she had devoted her time and means, and enjoyed to the full the sweet contentment of a religious life till her death in 1717.

Madame Guyon was a voluminous writer in poetry and prose, but her memory is kept green in Christian churches by a few simple hymns. The hymn that is best known and is most frequently sung is entitled, "The Soul that Loves God Finds Him Everywhere." As published in Cowper's works it consists of nine stanzas, but in Church hymnals it seldom appears in more than five. Perhaps the most suitable form of this touching and beautiful hymn is that of six stanzas, the sixth, seventh, and eighth being omitted:

O Thou, by long experience tried,
Near whom no grief can long abide,
My Lord! how full of sweet content
I pass my years of banishment!

All scenes alike engaging prove
To souls impressed with sacred love!
Where'er they dwell, they dwell in Thee:
In heaven, in earth, or on the sea.

To me remains nor place nor time,
My country is in every clime;
I can be calm and free from care
On any shore, since God is there.

While place we seek, or place we shun,
The soul finds happiness in none;
But with a God to guide our way,
'Tis equal joy to go or stay.

Could I be cast where Thou art not,
That were indeed a dreadful lot;
But regions none remote I call,
Secure of finding God in all.

Ah, then! to His embrace repair,
My soul, thou art no stranger there;
There love divine shall be thy guard,
And peace and safety thy reward.

Another hymn that strikingly illustrates Madame Guyon's peculiar mysticism and

"The

I ap

peaceful resignation, is entitled, Love of God, the End of Life." pend the full text, save a few changes made by an unknown hand to correct a faulty

metre:

If life in sorrow must be spent,
So be it; I am well content;
And meekly wait my last remove,
Desiring only trustful love.

No bliss I'll seek, but to fulfill
In life, in death, Thy perfect will;
No succor in my woes I want,
But what my Lord is pleased to grant.

Our days are numbered: let us spare
Our anxious hearts a needless care;
Tis Thine to number out our days;
'T is ours to give them to Thy praise.

Love is our only business here Love, simple, constant, and sincere; Oh! blessed days Thy servants see! Thus spent, O Lord! in pleasing Thee. The Rev. Thomas Cogswell Upham, for many years professor of mental and moral philosophy in Bowdoin College, made a thorough study of the life of Madame Guyon, and is warm in his admira

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tion of the perfection of her "interior life." He is of the opinion that most of her hymns were written when she was thirtyfour years old, six years after the death of M. Guyon, and when she was leaving Paris, not knowing what was in store for her of trial and persecution, but bent on reaching the highest possible Christian life and determined to see God everywhere. Her hymns, though small in number, will long abide as a memorial of one of the most saintly lives to be found in the annals of Christian womanhood.

Ο

NE

ANNE STEELE

before the death of Madame year Guyon a child was born at Broughton, England, that was destined to become the most distinguished female writer of sacred song of the eighteenth century. She was the daughter of William Steele, a timber merchant and an unsalaried lay-pastor of the Broughton Baptist congregation for nearly sixty years. The poetic gift was quite early manifest in Miss Steele, but it was not till she was forty-four that she consented to the publication of her hymns, that they might be available for public use.

The sweetest and tenderest of all hymns have usually been born of sorrow. Anne Steele was a child of much sorrow, and hence the pathetic tone, the deep Christian feeling, and the quiet resignation that characterize so many of her compositions. By an accident that occurred in her childhood she sustained injuries from which she never fully recovered; and her life