f princes. We may well be amazed at his political wisdom, and
taught more emphatically than ever that we are to look for this not to the
hack-politicians who think only of the cabals of the moment, but to the
sage men who interpret the future from the high ground of reason and
right. His political papers embody the lessons that France has since
learned by a baptism of blood. Hardly a single principle now deemed
necessary for the peace and prosperity of nations, can be named, that
cannot be found expressed or implied in Fenelon's various advice to the
royal youth under his charge. Well may the better minds of France and
Christendom honor his name for the noble liberality with which he
qualified the mild conservatism so congenial with his temperament, creed
and position.

As a theologian, he constantly breathes one engrossing sentiment. With
him, Christianity was the love of God and its morality was the love of the
neighbor. Judged by occasional expressions, his piety might seem too
ascetic and mystical--too urgent of penance and self-crucifixion--too
enthusiastic in emotion, perilling the sobriety of reason in the
impassioned fervors of devotion--sometimes bordering upon that
overstrained spiritualism, which, in its impulsive flights, is so apt to
lose its just balance and sink to the earth and the empire of the senses.
He has written some things that prudence, nay, wisdom, might wish to
erase. But, qualified by other statements, and above all, interpreted by
his own life, his religion appears in its true proportion--without gloom,
without extravagance. To his honor be it spoken, that in an age when
priests and prelates eminent for saintly piety sanctioned the scourging
and death of heretics, and enforced the Gospel chiefly by the fears of
perdition, Fenelon was censured for dwelling too much on the power of
love, that perfect charity that casteth out fear. It may, perhaps, be a
failing with him that he had too little sympathy with the fears and
passions of men, and appreciated too little the more sublime and terrible
aspects of Divine Providence. His mind was tuned too gently to answer to
all of the grandest music of our humanity, and we must abate something of
our admiration of him for his want of loyalty to the new ages of Christian
thought and heroism. He evidently loved Virgil more than Dante, Cicero
more than Chrysostom, and thought the Greek Parthenon, in its horizontal
lines and sensuous beauty, a grander and more