he was no follower of Molinos. He was drawn into the
controversy against his will by Bossuet, who requested him to endorse
an unscrupulous attack upon Madame Guyon. This made it necessary for
Fenelon to define his position, which he did in his famous _Maxims of
the Saints_. The treatise is important for our purposes, since it is
an elaborate attempt to determine the limits of true and false
Mysticism concerning two great doctrines--"disinterested love" and
"passive contemplation."

On the former, Fenelon's teaching may be summarised as follows:
Self-interest must be excluded from our love of God, for self-love is
the root of all evil. This predominant desire for God's glory need not
be always explicit--it need only become so on extraordinary occasions;
but it must always be implicit. There are five kinds of love for God:
(i.) purely servile--the love of God's gifts apart from Himself; (ii.)
the love of mere covetousness, which regards the love of God only as
the condition of happiness; (iii.) that of hope, in which the desire
for our own welfare is still predominant; (iv.) interested love, which
is still mixed with self-regarding motives; (v.) disinterested love.
He mentions here the "three lives" of the mystics, and says that in
the purgative life love is mixed with the fear of hell; in the
illuminative, with the hope of heaven; while in the highest stage "we
are united to God in the peaceable exercise of pure love." "If God
were to will to send the souls of the just to hell--so Chrysostom and
Clement suggest--souls in the third state would not love Him
less[308]." "Mixed love," however, is not a sin: "the greater part of
holy souls never reach perfect disinterestedness in this life." We
ought to wish for our salvation, because it is God's will that we
should do so. Interested love coincides with resignation,
disinterested with holy indifference. "St. Francis de Sales says that
the disinterested heart is like wax in the hands of its God."

We must continue to _co-operate_ with God's grace, even in the highest
stage, and not cease to resist our impulses, as if all came from God.
"To speak otherwise is to speak the language of the tempter." (This
is, of course, directed against the immoral apathy attributed to
Molinos.) The only difference between the vigilance of pure and that
of interested love, is that the former is simple and peaceable, while
the latter has not yet cast out fear. It is false teaching to say that
we