thing of the "love of
gratitude" to God and our Redeemer; that he "erects the rare and
transient experiences of a few saints into a rule of faith."

In this controversy about disinterested love, our sympathies are
chiefly, but not entirely, with Fenelon. The standpoint of Bossuet is
not religious at all. "Pure love," he says almost coarsely, "is
opposed to the essence of love, which always desires the enjoyment of
its object, as well as to the nature of man, who necessarily desires
happiness." Most of us will rather agree with St. Bernard, that love,
as such, desires nothing but reciprocation--"verus amor se ipso
contentus est: habet praemium, sed id quod amatur." If the question had
been simply whether religion is or is not in its nature mercenary, we
should have felt no doubt on which side the truth lay. Self-regarding
hopes and schemes may be schoolmasters to bring us to Christ; it
seems, indeed, to be part of our education to form them, and then see
them shattered one after another, that better and deeper hopes may be
constructed out of the fragments; but a selfish Christianity is a
contradiction in terms. But Fenelon, in his teaching about
disinterested love, goes further than this. "A man's self," he says,
"is his own greatest cross." "We must therefore become strangers to
this self, this _moi._" Resignation is not a remedy; for "resignation
suffers in suffering; one is as two persons in resignation; it is only
pure love that loves to suffer." This is the thought with which many
of us are familiar in James Hinton's _Mystery of Pain_. It is at
bottom Stoical or Buddhistic, in spite of the emotional turn given to
it by Fenelon. Logically, it should lead to the destruction of love;
for love requires two living factors,[312] and the person who has
attained a "holy indifference," who has passed wholly out of self, is
as incapable of love as of any other emotion. The attempt "to wind
ourselves too high for mortal man" has resulted, as usual, in two
opposite errors. We find, on the one hand, some who try to escape the
daily sacrifices which life demands, by declaring themselves bankrupt
to start with. And, on the other hand, we find men like Fenelon, who
are too good Christians to wish to shift their crosses in this way;
but who allow their doctrines of "holy indifference" and "pure love"
to impart an excessive sternness to their teaching, and demand from us
an impossible degree of detachment and renunciation.

The imp