JEREMY TAYLOR relates, in one of his sermons, the following legend:-"Saint Lewis the king having sent Ivo, bishop of Chartres, on an embassy, the bishop met a woman on the way, grave, sad, fantastic, and melancholy, with fire in one hand, and water in the other. He asked what these symbols meant. She answered, My purpose is with fire to burn Paradise, and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God without the incentives of hope and fear, and purely for the love of God." This fanciful personage may be regarded as the embodiment of that religious idea to which we give the name of Quietism. It is the ambition of the Quietist to attain a state in which self shall be practically annihilated,-in which nothing shall be desired, nothing feared,-in which the finite nature ignores itself and all creatures, and recognizes only the Infinite

is swallowed up and hidden in the effulgence. of the Divine Majesty. Quietism attempts self-transcendence by self-annihilation. It calls on man to become Nothing, that he may be dissolved in Him who is All. It has many various names to denote its beloved contrasts of self-emptiness and Divine fulness. That reduction of self to an inappreciable quantity which it inculcates, is called poverty, simplification, denudation, indifference, silence, quiet, death. That self-finding in God which is the immediate consequence of this self-loss, is termed union, transformation, perfection, pure love, immersion, absorption, deification.

Mysticism is the romance of religion. Its history is bright with stories of dazzling spiritual adventure, sombre with tragedies of the soul, stored with records of the achievements and the woes of martyrdom and saintship. It has reconciled the most opposite extremes of theory and practice. In theory it has verged repeatedly on pantheism, ego-theism, nihilism. In practice it has produced some of the most glorious examples of humility, benevolence, and untiring self-devotion. It has commanded with

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