in two opposite errors.  We find, on the one hand, some who try to escape the daily sacrifices which life demands, by declaring themselves bankrupt to start with.  And, on the other hand, we find men like Fenelon, who are too good Christians to wish to shift their crosses in this way; but who allow their doctrines of “holy indifference” and “pure love” to impart an excessive sternness to their teaching, and demand from us an impossible degree of detachment and renunciation.

The importance attached to the “prayer of quiet” can only be understood when we remember how much mechanical recitation of forms of prayer was enjoined by Romish “directors.”  It is, of course, possible for the soul to commune with God without words, perhaps even without thoughts;[313] but the recorded prayers of our Blessed Lord will not allow us to regard these ecstatic states as better than vocal prayer, when the latter is offered “with the spirit, and with the understanding also.”

The quietistic controversy in France was carried on in an atmosphere of political intrigues and private jealousies, which in no way concern us.  But the great fact which stands out above the turmoil of calumny and misrepresentation is that the Roman Church, which in sore straits had called in the help of quietistic Mysticism to stem the flood of Protestantism, at length found the alliance too dangerous, and disbanded her irregular troops in spite of their promises to submit to discipline.  In Fenelon, Mysticism had a champion eloquent and learned, and not too logical to repudiate with honest conviction consequences which some of his authorities had found it necessary to accept.  He remained a loyal and submissive son of the Church, as did Molinos; and was, in fact, more guarded in his statements than Bossuet, who in his ignorance of mystical theology often blundered into dangerous admissions[314].  But the Jesuits saw with their usual acumen that Mysticism, even in the most submissive guise, is an independent and turbulent spirit; and by condemning Fenelon as well as Molinos, they crushed it out as a religious movement in the Latin countries.

To us it seems that the Mysticism of the counter-Reformation was bound to fail, because it was the revival of a perverted, or at best a one-sided type.  The most consistent quietists were perhaps those who brought the doctrine of quietism into most discredit, such as the hesychasts of Mount Athos.  For at bottom it rests upon that dualistic or rather acosmistic view of life which prevailed from the decay of the Roman Empire till the Renaissance and Reformation.  Its cosmology is one which leaves this world out of account except as a training ground for souls; its theory of knowledge draws a hard and fast line between natural and supernatural truths, and then tries to bring them together by intercalating “supernatural phenomena” in the order of nature; and in ethics it paralyses morality by teaching with St. Thomas Aquinas that “to love God secundum se