178 DEVOTEES AND NUNS. [1620-38. 



favorite confessor, her oracle, guide, and comforter, 

 had lately been taken from her by promotion in 

 the Church, — which may serve to explain her 

 dejection ; and the new one, jealous of his prede- 

 cessor, told her that all his counsels had been 

 visionary and dangerous to her soul. Having over- 

 whelmed her with this announcement, he left her, 

 apparently out of patience with her refractory and 

 gloomy mood ; and she remained for several months 

 deprived of spiritual guidance.^ Two years elapsed 

 before her mind recovered its tone, when she soared 

 once more in the seventh heaven of imaginative 

 devotion. 



Marie de I'lncamation, we have seen, was unre- 

 lenting in every practice of humiliation; dressed 

 in mean attire, did the servants' work, nursed sick 

 beggars, and, in her meditations, taxed her brain 

 with metaphysical processes of self-annihilation. 

 And yet, when one reads her " Spiritual Letters," 

 the conviction of an enormous spiritual pride in the 

 writer can hardly be repressed. She asphed to 

 that inner circle of the faithful, that aristocracy of 

 devotion, which, while the common herd of Chris- 

 tians are busied with the duties of life, eschews the 

 visible and the present, and claims to live oiily for 

 God. In her strong maternal affection she saw 

 a lure to divert her from the path of perfect saint- 

 ship. Love for her child long withheld her from 

 becoming a nun ; but at last, fortified by her con- 

 fessor, she left him to his fate, took the vows, and 

 immured herself with the Ursulines of Tours. The 



1 Casgrain, 195-197. 



