efore them those of a bishop such as you. You
have only to give me my lesson in writing; provided that you wrote me
precisely what is the doctrine of the church, and what are the articles
in which I have slipped, I would tie myself down inviolably to that
rule." Bossuet required more; he wanted Fenelon, recently promoted to
the Archbishopric of Cambrai, to approve of the book he was preparing on
_Etats d'Oraison_ (States of Orison), and explicitly to condemn the works
of Madame Guyon. Fenelon refused with generous indignation. "So it is
to secure my own reputation," he writes to Madame de Maintenon, in 1696,
"that I am wanted to subscribe that a lady, my friend, would plainly
deserve to be burned with all her writings, for an execrable form of
spirituality, which is the only bond of our friendship? I tell you,
madame, I would burn my friend with my own hands, and I would burn myself
joyfully, rather than let the church be imperilled. But here is a poor
captive woman, overwhelmed with sorrows; there is none to defend her,
none to excuse her; they are always afraid to do so. I maintain that
this stroke of the pen, given by me against my conscience, from a
cowardly policy, would render me forever infamous, and unworthy of my
ministry and my position." Fenelon no longer submitted his reason and
his conduct, then, to the judgment of Bossuet; he recognized in him an
adversary, but he still spoke of him with profound veneration. "Fear
not," he writes to Madame de Maintenon, "that I should gainsay M. de
Meaux; I shall never speak of him but as of my master, and of his
propositions but as the rule of faith." Fenelon was at Cambrai, being
regular in the residence which removed him for nine months in the year
from the court and the children of France, when there appeared his
_Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie Interieure_ (Exposition of
the Maxims of the Saints touching the Inner Life), almost at the same
moment as Bossuet's _Instruction sur les Etats d' Oraison_ (Lessons on
States of Orison). Fenelon's book appeared as dangerous as those of
Madame Guyon; he himself submitted it to the pope, and was getting ready
to repair to Rome to defend his cause, when the king wrote to him, "I do
not think proper to allow you to go to Rome; you must, on the contrary,
repair to your diocese, whence I forbid you to go away; you can send to
Rome your pleas in justification of your book."

Fenelon departed to an exile which w