"Is thy cruse of comfort wasting?" "Hear my prayer, O heavenly Father CATHERINE WINKWORTH, 1829-1878 "Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates' CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI, 1830-1894 "I will not faint, but trust in God". "I would have gone; God bade me stay ELIZABETH CECILIA CLEPHANE, 1830-1869 "There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay" EMILY HUNTINGTON MILLER, 1833- "Enter Thy temple, glorious King!" 66 Kingdom of Light! whose morning star" FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL, 1839-1879 Contents "My heart is tired, so tired to-night "The gates of life swing either way "For all Thy care we bless Thee" SONGS FROM THE HEARTS of WOMEN JEANNE MARIE BOUVIER DE LA MOTHE GUYON TH HE first Christian hymn was the spontaneous utterance of the heart of a woman. It was the beautiful Magnificat, and was sung by Mary, mother of Jesus, at the home of her cousin Elizabeth, at or near Hebron, in the hill country of Judea. The earliest metrical hymns contributed by a woman to our hymnology were written by Madame Guyon; and in Cowper's fine translation several of them are found in a large number of hymnals used in Englishspeaking countries. Madame Guyon was born of wealthy parents at Montargis, France, in 1648. She was wonderfully precocious and devoutly pious, and in her tender childhood She was so loved to dress as a little nun. deeply religious that she destined herself for the cloister, but her parents interfered with her cherished plans, and before Jeanne was quite sixteen they espoused her to Jacques Guyon, a man of large wealth and twenty-two years her senior. After twelve years of married life, which had been full of entangling difficulties and bitter disappointments, Madame Guyon became a widow, and shortly afterwards she determined to make a gift of her life to the cause of the poor, and to engage in the special business of cultivating that spiritual perfection called Quietism: Jeremy Taylor says the Bishop of Chartres once met a woman, who was grave and melancholy, holding fire in one hand and water in the other. He asked what those symbols meant, and her answer was: My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentive of hope or fear, and purely for the love of God." This fanciful personage has been taken as the embodiment of that religious idea known as Quietism, of which Madame Guyon was the most famous devotee. She was an ardent Roman Catholic, but her methods and creed irritated the Church authorities, and twelve years after entering widowhood she was confined in a convent in Paris. In the hope that a brief imprisonment might teach her to maintain a milder attitude toward spiritual affairs, Madame Guyon was set at liberty in the course of a few months. But her zeal for a religion of inward spirit and power seemed uncontrollable, and when she had attained the zenith of her fame as a teacher of Quietism, she was placed in the castle of Vincennes, and was held for three years. In 1698 she was removed to the Bastile in Paris, where she lingered four years a solitary prisoner in one of the darkest of dungeons. In the same tower was confined "The Man with the Iron Mask"-a personage of unknown name; and, to quote from the Living Age," she may have heard in her cell the melancholy notes of the guitar with which her fellow-prisoner beguiled a captivity whose horrors had then lasted |