and of
exalted character, a Christian, a saint, but a mystic--it was Madame
Guyon. Madame Guyon taught that it was possible to love God for himself
alone, purely and disinterestedly. Fenelon received the doctrine, and
Madame Guyon was patronized by Madame de Maintenon. Bossuet scented
heresy. He was too much a "natural man" to understand Madame Guyon. The
king was like the prelate, his minister, in spirit, and in consequent
incapacity. It was resolved that Fenelon must condemn Madame Guyon. But
Fenelon would not. He was very gentle, very conciliatory, but in fine he
would not. Controversy ensued, haughty, magisterial, domineering, on the
part of Bossuet; on the part of Fenelon, meek, docile, suasive. The
world wondered, and watched the duel. Fenelon finally did what king
James's translators misleadingly make Job wish that his adversary had
done,--he wrote a book, "The Maxims of the Saints." In this book, he
sought to show that the accepted, and even canonized, teachers of the
Church had taught the doctrine for which, in his own case and in the
case of Madame Guyon, condemnation was now invoked. Bossuet was pope at
Paris; and he, in full presence, denounced to the monarch the heresy of
Fenelon. At this moment of crisis for Fenelon, it happened that news was
brought him of the burning of his mansion at Cambray with all his books
and manuscripts. It will always be remembered that Fenelon only said:
"It is better so than if it had been the cottage of a poor
laboring-man."

Madame de Maintenon, till now his friend, with perfectly frigid facility
separated herself from the side of the accused. The controversy was
carried to Rome, where at length Fenelon's book was
condemned,--condemned mildly, but condemned. The pope is said to have
made the remark that Fenelon erred by loving God too much, and Fenelon's
antagonists by loving their fellow-man too little. Fenelon bowed to the
authority of the Church, and meekly in his own cathedral confessed his
error. It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he
did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit,
however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the
manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been
done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph
over so much sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and
beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to vi