the terrible operations of God's Hand, knowing no better aid to Faith than the spectacle of mighty empires swept from the path of the Messiah, the Jews, who rejected Him, scattered to all the winds of heaven, the Roman Empire, drunk with the blood of the martyrs, delivered over to the barbarians, wandering hordes of brutal idolaters, unworthy even to be called a people, yet destined now to find a God they never sought, and build up in His Name a civilization and a State. And yet the Epiphany Sermon lacks the note of triumph of Bossuet's great Discourse: we may rejoice, Fénelon says, at the conquests of religion, at the Cross planted in a new hemisphere larger than the old, at the missionary zeal which bears the Gospel to lands that Alexander's lust of conquest never reached-yet in rejoicing we must also tremble; the vocation of these Eastern peoples may betoken the secret reprobation of ourselves; they may be called to raise a new Temple on our ruins, as the Gentiles on the ruin of the Jewish, and the Church of France be what the Churches of Antioch and Alexandria are become, or like the African land of Augustine, still smoking from the thunderbolt of God.

And through all Fénelon's spiritual writings runs this strain of melancholy. The whole human race is painted falling into decay before our eyes, a hundred new worlds. rising on the ashes of the age that saw our birth; we are the shadow of a dream, “a wretched crowd of changing things"

None other than a moving row

Of visionary shapes, that come and go
Around the sun-illumined lantern, held
In midnight by the master of the show.

Nor may we know the part we play in the drama of our own world's history. Its great events are like the letters of a giant alphabet, so huge that they defy our feeble sight; we may, here and there, spell out a single one, but not till

1 See in particular a tine passage in Wks., vi. p. 150.

the world has run its course, may we hope to read the whole of the message, and cry, with God's map rolled out before us, that He alone is just and wise.1

And so Fénelon passes from the Shadow to the Substance, to chant the praises of the Changeless and Eternal, Him whose Name is the Name revealed to Moses in the desert: I am that I am. To us the highest attribute of Divinity might seem not Being, but Becoming, a quickening, fructifying breath of life, ein ewiges lebendiges Thun—

Umzuschaffen das Geschaffene

Damit sich's nicht zum Starren waffne:

In keinem Falle darf es ruhn

but the Age of Louis XIV. thought otherwise, and Fénelon, in his conception of the Deity, was a true child of his age. Its massive harmonies and love of stable, orderly magnificence speak in his stately chapters on the Unity, Eternity, Incomprehensibility of God, as the Creed from which those terms are borrowed inspires the triumphal march of his sentences, exulting in the mystery they preach and in forcing it on other minds, heavily laden, yet not bowed down, with resonant metaphysical jargon, great echoing epithets and clanging reverberations of one central word, as when their writer cries to God: Plus on vous contemple, plus ou aime à se taire, en considérant ce que c'est que cet étre qui n'est qu'être, qui est le plus être de tous les êtres, et qui est si souverainement être qu'il fait lui seul être tout ce qui est

Yet in the very splendour of the rhetoric lay its danger. Fénelon, who could never touch without adorning, and never adorn without extravagance, exalts the majesty and unity of God till the mind is dizzied by a truth beyond all speech or thought, all affirmation or denial, and sinks, as Fénelon sank himself, into "a view wholly obscure and indistinct and general," the philosophical accompaniment of Quietist passivity, or else into some vague dilettantism of the Infinite, that 2 Ibid. p. 84.

1 Wks., i. p. 42.

asks not for law or creed or gospel, nor yet for Spinoza's grandly sombre rationality, but only for the luxuries of sentiment, and a God to tingle through its nerves.1 Are we so far from Faust's confession of his faith to Margaret when Fénelon cries: Not in the multitude of Thy perfections do I best conceive Thee. The more I separate and distinguish, the more I weaken and diminish Thee, the more I weaken and confuse my sight. This crowd of attributes is not my God, these parcelled out infinities not the Infinitely One. How poor, multiplicity, thy seeming abundance! Numbers promise unity, and give it not; composite notions fall to pieces in my hands; thoughts, with me one moment, vanish irrecoverably the next-who will bring me out from these things that smell of nothingness? Myself a bundle of such vanities, I must divide Reality to grasp it, and confess that Indivisible Unity is beyond the reach of multitude.'2

But the youthful extravagances of the Treatise must not be taken too seriously. Combien la rime, asks the Logic of Port Royal, n'a-t-elle engagé de gens à mentir? and none knew better than Fénelon that the same danger waits on metaphysical préciosité. Here, even more than elsewhere, his later writings are a recantation of past errors; the very Maxims suddenly descry behind the tremulous heresies of Molinos the dreaded countenance of Spinoza, and urge that to separate God's Being from His Attributes is to pass from Christianity into Deism, and thence into "a kind of Atheism, where creature and Creator are made one." 3 And how much more Christian, and how much more really indicative of his thought, are those later letters to the Duke of Orleans, wherein Fénelon, laying aside all metaphysical pretence, speaks simply as a priest, to warn the royal Deist that there is such a thing as mock humility, and that reckless exaltation

See two brilliant pages of M. Lanson's Bossuet (pp. 428, 429), where Fénelon's Quietism is deduced from his philosophy. But, as I have tried to show in chap. vi., Quietism had only a very shadowy connection with metaphysics. 2 Wks., i. p. 76, and cf. p. 84. 3 Maximes des Saints, p. 192.

ร

of the majesty of God is often the first step to bowing Him politely from the universe. 'Two conceptions of the Godhead lie before you the one of a Ruler good and vigilant and wise, who will be loved and feared of men, the other of a First Cause so high that He cares nothing for the souls He made, for their virtue or their vice, their disobedience or their love. Examine well these two conceptions, and I defy you to prefer the second to the first.'1

1 Second Letter to Orleans, i. § 10. Wks., i. p. 105.

CHAPTER XIII

THE LETTER TO THE ACADEMY

He comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.—J. H. Newman, “Grammar of Assent."

TÉLÉMAQUE once published, Fénelon, since his acces

sion to the episcopate, had remained a bankrupt on Parnassus.' Only within a few months of his death was this silence broken by a Letter on the Occupations of the French Academy. The Letter's title masks its real importance; in the guise of a mere academic programme, it is Fénelon's answer to the chief literary problems of his age, more especially in relation to two controversies then proceeding, the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the wider, more perennial, battle between the Classic and Romantic schools.

The first of these, the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, had raged intermittently during nearly the whole of Fénelon's lifetime. In the larger sense it was a struggle between the exclusive worshippers of Greece and Rome and those who held all earlier literature to be only a preparative, first steps toward that summit of supreme inimitable perfection, reached only in the age of Louis the Great. It was an argument for and against the reality of progress, in poetry, in science, in the arts, a war between the Protestants and Catholics of literature, Reason setting itself up against Authority, the judgment of the street against æsthetic canons, inventiveness against prescriptive right; it was the Modern belief that each generation stands upon the shoulders of its