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Title: The Wing-and-Wing
Le Feu-Follet

Author: J. Fenimore Cooper

Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11957]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

WING-AND-WING

OR

LE FEU-FOLLET

_A TALE_

BY

J. FENIMORE COOPER

"Know,
Without star or angel for their guide,
Who worship God shall find him."

PREFACE.

It is difficult to say of which there is most in the world, a blind
belief in religious dogmas, or a presumptuous and ignorant cavilling on
revelation. The impression has gone abroad, that France was an example
of the last, during the height of her great revolutionary mania; a
charge that was scarcely true, as respects the nation, however just it
might be in connection with her bolder and more unquiet spirits. Most of
the excesses of France, during that momentous period, were to be
attributed to the agency of a few, the bulk of the nation having little
to do with any part of them, beyond yielding their physical and
pecuniary aid to an audacious and mystifying political combination. One
of the baneful results, however, of these great errors of the times, was
the letting loose of the audacious from all the venerable and healthful
restraints of the church, to set them afloat on the sea of speculation
and conceit. There is something so gratifying to human vanity in
fancying ourselves superior to most around us, that we believe few young
men attain their majority without imbibing more or less of the taint of
unbelief, and passing through the mists of a vapid moral atmosphere,
before they come to the clear, manly, and yet humble perceptions that
teach most of us, in the end, our own insignificance, the great
benevolence as well as wisdom of the scheme of redemption, and the
philosophy of the Christian religion, as well as its divinity.

Perhaps the greatest stumbling-block of the young is a disposition not
to yield to their belief unless it conforms to the