When we reach more optimistic temperaments, the resignation grows less passive. Examples are sown so broadcast throughout history that I might well pass on without citation. As it is, I snatch at the first that occurs to my mind. Madame Guyon, a frail creature physically, was yet of a happy native disposition. She went through many perils with admirable serenity of soul. After being sent to prison for heresy—
“Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears from me. … There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing which God does.”
In another place she writes:
“We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to pass.