" T. C.
Upham: The Life and Religious Experiences of Madame de la Mothe
Guyon, New York, 1877, vol. i. p. 260.
[160] I have considerably abridged the words of the original,
which is given in Edwards's Narrative of the Revival in New
England.
The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or
more ecstatic than this. "Often the assaults of the divine
love," it is said of the Sister Seraphique de la Martiniere,
"reduced her almost to the point of death. She used tenderly to
complain of this to God. 'I cannot support it,' she used to say.
'Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire under the
violence of your love.'"[161]
[161] Bougaud: Hist. de la Bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, 1894,
p. 125.
Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a
usual fruit of saintliness, and have always been reckoned
essential theological virtues, however limited may have been the
kinds of service which the particular theology enjoined.
Brotherly love would follow logically from the assurance of God's
friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as men being an
immediate inference from that of God's fatherhood of us all.
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