lettered solitude or corporal austerities of a ruder age; knowledge, within certain limits, he held to be a most worthy support of piety, and to the torture of the body he preferred the mortification of the mind by renunciation of all earthly interests and ties, by entire surrender of the Will into the hands of a Director. For M. Olier set before his pupils an ideal of almost terrible severity. The good priest, he said, must become a model of all the virtues of every state; in him the Religious Orders and the laity must find the pattern of their several perfections.1 Lessons so exalted may doubtless have proved a useful spur to the languid piety of the many; they were no small danger to a highly self-conscious temperament, always prone to rush into extremes, and ill provided with that moral thickness of skin which deadens in coarser natures the effect of an oft-repeated shock. Fénelon had not been long at St Sulpice before their influence began to tell on him in the form of mysterious communications to his Director." I most earnestly wish," he wrote to the Marquis de Fénelon, "that I could enter into some detail to you of my conversations with M. Tronson, but, indeed, sir, I cannot do it. For, although my relation to you is very frank and open, I must confess and I do so without fear of exciting your jealousy that I am much more explicit with him, nor would it even be easy to describe to you the degree of union we have reached." 2 It is likely enough that M. Tronson, no friend to spiritual extravagances, might have disapproved alike the tone of this letter and its account of his relations to his pupil ; even M. Olier, though himself a visionary and a mystic, could deal in very trenchant fashion with outbursts of religious hysteria. Yet it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that St Sulpice, with its intense inwardness and scrupulosity, its love of Direction and probings of conscience, did much to foster the growth of that morbid 1 See Faillon, Vie de M. Olier (Paris, 1873), iii. pp. 117-127. element in Fénelon's character, which, twenty years later, made him a ready listener to Mme. Guyon. None the less, the Seminary did him great and lasting service. Its stubborn pedantic unworldliness, its straightforward singleness of purpose, were the best of disciplines for one whose leading characteristic was not simplicity, whose manifold talents needed the reminder that culture and brilliance are little enough without a moral foundation. Nay, the grave sweetness, the reasonable tenderness of the greater Spiritual Letters or the Education of Girls, is nothing other than the religion of M. Olier, softened by a larger knowledge of God and man, and moulded by an artist of transcendent power. And in this home of piety and study Fénelon laid the foundations of that happy union of Greek with Christian antiquity, whose results will meet us in the Dialogues on Eloquence and Télémaque. There was even a time, soon after his ordination, when he dreamed of a missionary journey to the Levant, drawn thither not only by a desire to make the voice of the Apostle heard once more in the Church of Corinth, or to stand on that Areopagus from which St Paul had preached to the Sages of this world an unknown God, but also by a wish to breathe in among those precious monuments and ruins the very essence of the antique.' "After the Sacred comes the Profane; I do not scorn to descend from the Areopagus to the Piræus, where Socrates sketched the plan of his Republic; I shall mount to the double summit of Parnassus; I shall pluck the laurels of Delphi; I shall revel in the joys of Tempe."1 This project, however, was not doomed to be fulfilled. Fénelon abandoned it in deference to the wishes of his family, and devoted himself to work in the parish of St Sulpice, till, in 1678, he was appointed Superior of the New Catholics of Paris, a position soon to become of some importance. Meanwhile his relatives interested themselves. 1 Wks., vii. p. 491. warmly in his fortunes; the Marquis de Fénelon received him into his house and hastened to introduce him to his friends; another uncle, the Bishop of Sarlat, tried to secure his election to the Assembly of the Clergy of 1675, as a Proctor for the Province of Bordeaux, and made over to him, a few years later, the little Deanery of Carénac, a sinecure, whose value-about £400 a year of modern money -was hardly proportionate to the pomp with which the new Dean took possession. "I must certainly," wrote Fénelon to one of the ladies of his family, "be a man destined to make magnificent entries. A deputy of the local nobility, the Rector, the Prior of the Monastery, with a few farmers, representing the Third Estate, came to escort me in state from Sarlat to the port of Carénac. The quay was lined with masses of people; two boats, filled with the élite of the neighbourhood, approached me on arrival, and I noticed that the most warlike soldiery the place could furnish were hidden by a gallant stratagem in the pretty island you know well. Thence they marched forth in battle array, and saluted me with such a deafening roar of musketry that the air was filled with smoke, and my fiery steed would certainly have thrown himself into the water, had I not had the moderation to dismount. Everyone made instant way for me, every eye sought to read its owner's destiny in mine, as I proceeded to the Castle with slow and stately pace, the better to lend myself to the public curiosity. Drums and cheers accompanied my route; at least a thousand voices cried that I should certainly be the darling of my people. At the Castle gate the Consuls harangued me by the mouth of their Royal Orator, an officer whose eloquence was fully worthy of his exalted station. He compared me to the sun; soon afterwards I became the moon; every one of the more radiant stars had the honour of resembling me, and so we passed on through the Four Elements and the meteors, and finished up happily with the Creation of the World. By this time the sun had sunk to rest; and I, to complete my likeness to him, hastened to my bed-room and prepared to do the same." 1 To this early period, also, belongs the beginning of Fénelon's intimacy with Bossuet, lately become the leading figure of the Church of France; and it was at Bossuet's instance that he embarked on his first serious work, a Refutation of some of the errors of the famous contemporary metaphysician, Father Malebranche. By this friendship, however, he forfeited the good-will of his own diocesan, Archbishop de Harlai, who, incensed at the brilliant young Abbé's rare appearance at his levées, told him, on one occasion, that his wish to be forgotten would certainly be respected. But Fénelon's career was not to be made or marred by the dispositions of a profligate courtier, whose sun of favour was already setting before the rise of M de Maintenon; nor could de Harlai ever have been very zealously inclined towards a nephew of the stern old devotee, who had once publicly reminded him that Louis XIV. was not the only Master to whom prelates must give in an account of their stewardship. A road to favour, at once more sure and more congenial, was opened to Fénelon when he became acquainted, through the good offices of his uncle, with that devout section of the aristocracy, which Mme. de Maintenon was soon to raise to power. Meanwhile, the young Abbé, in his modest situation at the New Catholics, was being brought into the vortex of calamities and scandals, that eddied round the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and forced to take a side on one of the greatest questions of the age, the question of Religious Toleration. 1 Wks., vii. p. 394. 2 See below, c. xii. CHAPTER II TOLERATION AND THE PROTESTANTS Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. -MILTON, AREOPAGITICA. HE E would write imperfectly indeed on Fénelon's relation to the Protestants who did not begin by warning his readers against the legend of that churchman's tolerance invented by the eighteenth century. From the time when Voltaire said that M. de Cambrai, had he only been born in England, would have become a genuine thinker, and Rousseau wished to have been his footman, Fénelon has been a favourite with the philosophers, to be honoured not merely as a vague precursor of the modern world in general, but as the harbinger of each particular reform, and more especially of Liberty of Conscience. And the reason is not far to seek. Careless enough of history themselves, the French reformers knew their world, and saw how far more closely it listens to the Prophets who dimly foreshadowed a new gospel in the past, than to the Apostles, who, in the fulness of time, preach it in all its light and dignity. Hence their devotion to retrospective proselytism, to the furbishing up of a roll of such prophets, swept together by hasty zeal rather than by critical sagacity, as unconscious witnesses to the new Revelation; hence their crowning of many a great name with posthumous honours from which the living man would have shrunk, as from a brand of disgrace. Strange and eclectic indeed are many of their lists of heroes. There Francis of Sales and Fénelon take high place, because they showed some kindness to misbelievers; |