was the object of so much affliction. Night was setting in, but before it was dark he had himself driven it before him to the peasant's new habitation. Should any one sneer at an archbishop's driving home a cow, as O'Malley would say: "Troth, and he's guilty of something worse than an Irish bull!" Speaking of this little anecdote, the Cardinal Maury says: "I have always looked upon this as the finest trait in Fenelon's life. Wo to those who listen to it, without being affected!" It was by a character like this that Fenelon won the hearts of his flock, and the heart once gained, the duty of the pastor becomes light. Long after his death, the old people who had the happiness to see him, spoke of him with the most tender reverence. "There," they would say, pointing to a chair carefully preserved in one corner of their cottage, "there is the chair on which our good archbishop used to sit in the midst of us: we shall never see such another"—and then their tears would flow.

You will all wonder how such a man could be pursued by the unrelenting hatred of Louis XIV, and I think I hear you whisper, that it certainly was not one of the things that made him Louis le grand. Not only was the court closed against him and his relations, but it was part of the etiquette of the day never to pronounce Fenelon's name at Versailles. It is, however, pleasing to know, that the duke of Burgundy's attachment to him was never weakened. The preceptor and pupil frequently corresponded. When the duke took the command of the army in Flanders, he was compelled to ask leave of Louis to visit Fenelon in his way through Cambray ; it could only be done in the presence of certain persons who were named. The atmosphere about Fenelon must, forsooth, have been mighty dangerous! In an affectionate letter, the duke had apprised Fene lon of this permission. When the courier arrived at Cambray with the letter, Fenelon, with that delicacy which was natural to him, had absented himself from the town, not to put himself unasked in the duke's way. They met, however, at a public dinner, but a meeting in the presence

of spies, wanted the grace of unrestraint. Once or twice Fenelon said something to enliven the conversation; but all would not do. According to etiquette, he presented the duke, at the end of dinner, with a napkin to wipe his hands. The pupil availed himself of this moment to unbosom his heart to his old preceptor; then, raising his voice loud enough to be heard by all present, he said to him: "I am sensible, my lord archbishop, of what I owe to you, and you know what and who I am." They never met again. When Fenelon's uncle lay on his death bed in Paris a lady ventured to breathe Fenelon's name in the royal ear and to entreat permission for him to pay the last duty of humanity to his relative. This lady was the Marquess de Bouvilliers, and her request was coldly refused. It is known that the king's resentment was confirmed by the publication of "Telemachus," in the moral strictures of which charming work, the royal eye was keen enough to see what no other mortal vision could detect, a bitter satire against himself and his favorites. The book lives, in spite of royal censure and royal suppression, to instruct our own and all future generations, innocent of any satire contained in its pages :

"Suspicion ever haunts the guilty mind."

In his retirement at Cambray, during the intervals between his pastoral duties, Fenelon found leisure for writing, and for philosophical disquisition, as witness, among other works of the kind, his "Treatise on the Existence of God," written to satisfy the doubts of the future regent of France, the Duke d'Orleans, who refused to bend his reason to religion, and yet was a firm believer in astrology; whence the hit of our poet Pope :

"The godless regent trembling at a star."

Fenelon was a passionate admirer of Virgil, and we learn that he translated the Æneid, though unfortunately the manuscript is lost; perhaps it perished in the fire of which we have spoken. Fenelon was also mingled up in the fierce disputes relative to Jansenism, and was severely handled by writers on both sides. Of the

errors revived by the Jansenists, Molina was the originator, as Molinos was of the reveries of Quietism, so that Fenelon suffered from both. The whimsical coincidence in these names, Molinos and Molina, did not escape the wags of that day; one of them turns the thing in a way which it is not very easy to translate, but which is something like the following:

He who Sylla's rocks would shun,
In Charybdis' jaws may run;
But who suffers shipwreck, who,
On Sylla and Charybdis too?
Vast is the gulph, as some suppose,
"Twixt Molina and Molinos,
Yet Fenelon got wrecked, oh la!
On Molinos and Molina.

Among other works of Fenelon, are his Sermons, which, if not of so high an order as those of his great contemporaries, Bourdaloue and Massillon, have the merit of being practical, plain, and full of unction. Fenelon preached to instruct the ignorant, not to gratify the amateur; and his discourses are always intelligible to the commonest intellect. They could not address to him the compliment paid by a good woman to a pompous preacher: "I admire you very much, sir, but I should admire you still more if I could understand you."

A circumstance has been omitted in its proper place, which came to light only by the publication of the Fenelon papers, and which you will listen to with peculiar interest. It has been mentioned that the first aspirations of Fenelon on his entrance into holy orders, was to join the missions in the Levant. This is not correct. America was the first field for his missionary labors, and it was nothing but the delicate state of the young ecclesiastic's health which prevented this side of the Atlantic from sharing something of the celebrity of this illustrious name.

On the 7th of January, 1715, the world was deprived of one of its brightest ornaments; Fenelon was called away to receive the reward of his labors. The good man never dies when we read his writings we are conscious of his immortality, he is with us, his spirit is among us, to instruct and to edify till time shall be no more. The last words of remarkable men are carefully

treasured up. They are as the last brightening up of the expiring taper of life, and are preserved to image to the last the tone, character and history of the individual. Viewed in this light the parting words of Fenelon are remarkable. As he sunk back upon his pillow, his lips softly breathed those words of his Redeemer: "Not my will, but thine be done."

Such a man could not die in enmity with any human being. On his death bed he dictated a letter to his early patron and friend, Louis XIV, addressed to the king's confessor, Pere Lachaise. We give it, as well as his last will and testament, as they are the most perfect commentary upon the last words of Fenelon. There is a sacredness in sentiments breathed forth at a moment when no human consideration has any influence over them. His words to the king are these: "I have just received extreme unction. I am preparing to appear before my God, and I entreat you forthwith to represent to the king what are my real sentiments. I have ever felt the greatest docility towards the Church, and the greatest abhorrence of the innovations imputed to me. I received the condemnation of my book with the most absolute sincerity. There has never been a single moment of my life, in which I have not felt towards the king, the most profound respect and the most inviolable attachment. I take the liberty of soliciting from his majesty two favors, neither of which concerns either myself or any belonging to me. The first is that he will have the goodness to appoint a fit successor to feed the flock which is dear to my heart. The other is that he will aid my successor to finish what I had begun for the seminary of St. Sulpice. I am already indebted to his majesty for resources to found an institution, than which nothing can be more useful, venerable, and apostolical. I pray that his majesty may enjoy length of days, for the good, both of the Church and state. If I am to go and behold my God, I will frequently implore that blessing."

Fenelon's will runs as follows: "I declare that I die in the arms of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church my mother. God, who reads the human heart, and who

is to be my judge, knows that in every moment of my life, I have felt for her the submission and the docility of a little child. When I wrote the Maxims of the Saints,' I had no other intention than to separate what the saints have truly and really experienced from the illusions of the false mystics, and thus to justify the one and reject the other. I produced the work in conformity to the advice of persons most opposite to any species of illusion, nor did I print it, till they had examined it. I endeavored to justify and vindicate this little book so long as I was at liberty so to do. As soon as Pope Innocent XII condemned the work, I sincerely adhered to that condemnation, without any reservation whatever; as, before receiving the act of the holy see, I had promised to do. From the moment it was condemned, I never said a single word in its justification. As to those who attacked it, my only thought was to pray for them in all sincerity of heart, and to live with them in the union of fraternal charity. To the Church universal, and to the apostolic see I submit all my writings, and I condemn in them whatever she condemns.

"Though I tenderly love my family, nor am unmindful of the bad state of their affairs; yet I cannot think myself at liberty to bequeath what I possess here. The goods of the Church are not intended for the wants of a family, and it ought only to pass into the hands of the Church.

"It is my wish to be buried in the metropolitan church of Cambray, in the most simple manner, and at the least possible expense. I do not express this merely from form, or from any affectation of modesty. It is from a persuasion that the money expended on costly funerals may be better employed in works of mercy; and that the plain simplicity of a bishop's interment may instruct the laity to moderate the sums vainly lavished upon theirs." Thus we see that Fenelon would not only die in his simplicity, but would also be buried in his simplicity.

Eighty years had scarcely elapsed from the death of Fenelon when the ruffians of the revolution, with fell and desperate purpose,

made a pile of ruins of the ancient and venerable temple in which the good archbishop had celebrated the mysteries of religion; overthrew the altar before which he had so often breathed his prayers for the welfare of France, and hurled to the dust the pulpit from which that voice had so often sent forth benedictions. The repose of the dead was violated, and the ashes of kings, who slept beneath the roofs of antiquity, and of prelates who reposed beneath the shadow of the sanctuary, were scattered to the winds of heaven.

In 1819, the author of this article accompanied two young English noblemen in an excursion through the north of France. In our way through Cambray, we delivered a letter of introduction from the well known M. de Chateaubriand, to the lady superior of the sisters of charity in that city. After a courteous reception by the lady (a member, I believe, of the noble house of Montmorency), we were conducted into a small but neat chapel. At the foot of the altar was a catafalque, at each corner of which a taper was burning. The good sister who accompanied us, uncovered part of a plain velvet pall, and displayed beneath it a simple coffin of polished wood. That coffin contained all that was mortal of the good Fenelon. It had been rescued by the pious care, perhaps by the intrepidity, of those who loved and venerated him, and had been concealed till the fury of the tempest had swept by. The day of its restoration was celebrated with transports of joy by the good Flemmings, the children of those, who had enjoyed the enviable privilege of listening to his instructions and profiting by his example. While we were intently gazing upon the coffin, the good sister knelt in prayer at the foot of the altar. Myself, and my two travelling companions, Protestants though they were, followed her example. Fenelon is not in the list of the canonized; but who will say that he is not worthy to take his rank there? In our excursion, we had seen monuments of the most costly kind, and gazed upon shrines radiant in jewels and gold; but we had witnessed nothing so touching as this simple coffin of wood, and this little chapel with its

unpretending decorations. They were in harmony with the character of him whose ashes they contained, and to whose last request we have just listened. We seemed to feel something of the influence spoken of by St. Chrysostom, when describing the chapel of the martyr Babylas: "A hallowed ether seemed to float around these sacred precincts; no earthly air, but a breathing from above, that penetrated to the very soul." We retired from this impressive scene full of feelings of veneration and

awe.

The bad man's death is horror: but the just
Leave something of their glory in their dust.

The late Dr. Channing pronounced an eulogium on Fenelon; an extract or two may be acceptable to those who are not acquainted with the work. "We welcome a book from Fenelon. He wrote from his own mind, and seldom has a purer mind tabernacled in flesh. His works have the great charm of coming fresh from the soul. Fenelon saw far into the human heart, and especially into the lurkings of self-love. He looked with a piercing eye through the disguises of sin. But he knew sin, not, as most men do, by bitter experience of its power, so much as by his knowledge and experience of virtue. Deformity was revealed to him by his refined perception and intense love of moral beauty. The light which he carried with him into the dark corners of the human heart, and by which he laid open its most hidden guilt, was that of celestial goodness. Hence, though the severest of censors, he is the most pitying. Not a tone of asperity escapes him. He looks on human error with an angel's tenderness, with tears which an angel might shed, and thus reconciles and binds us to our race, at the very moment of revealing its corruptions.

"When we think of Fenelon in the palace of Louis XIV, it reminds us of a seraph sent on a divine commission into the abodes of the lost; and when we recollect that in such an atmosphere he composed his Telemachus, we doubt whether the records of the world furnish stronger evidence of the power of a divine virtue, to turn tempta

tion into glory and strength, and to make even crowned and prosperous vice a means of triumph and exaltation.

"We said that we welcomed a book because it came from so pure and gifted a mind. We add, that we do not welcome it the less for coming from a Catholic. Perhaps we prize it the more for we wish that Protestantism may grow wiser and more tolerant, and we know not a better teacher of these lessons than the character of Fenelon. Such a man is enough to place within the pale of our charity, the whole body to which he belonged. His virtue is broad enough to shield his whole Church from that unmeasured, undistinguishing reprobation, with which Protestant zeal has too often assailed it. Whoever remembers, that the Catholic communion numbers in its ranks more than one hundred millions of souls, probably more than all other Christian churches together, must shudder at the sentence of proscription, which has sometimes been passed on this immense portion of human beings. It is time that greater justice were done to this ancient and wide-spread community. The Catholic Church has produced some of the greatest and best men that ever lived, and this is proof enough of its possessing all the means of salvation. Who that hears the tone of contempt, in which it is sometimes named, would suspect that Charlemagne, Alfred, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Fenelon, Bossuet, Pascal, Des Cartes, were Catholics? Some of the greatest names in arts and arms, on the throne and in the pulpit, were worn by Catholics. To come down to our own times, has not the metropolis of New England witnessed a sublime example of Christian virtue in a Catholic bishop? Who, among our religious teachers, would solicit a comparison between himself and the deVoted CHEVERUS? This good man, whose virtues and talents raised him to high dignities in Church and state, who wore in his own country the joint honors of an archbishop and a peer, lived in the midst of us, devoting his days and nights, and his whole heart, to the service of a poor and uneducated congregation. We saw him declining, in a great degree, the society of the

cultivated and refined, that he might be the friend of the ignorant and friendless; leaving the circles of polished life, which he would have graced, for the meanest hovels; bearing with a father's sympathy, the burdens and sorrows of his large spiritual family, charging himself alike with their temporal and spiritual concerns; and never discovering, by the faintest indication, that he felt his fine mind degraded by his seemingly humble office. This good man, bent on the errands of mercy, was seen in our streets under the most burning sun of summer, and the fiercest storms of winter, as if armed against the elements by the power of charity. He has left us, but not to be forgotten. He enjoys among us what, to such a man, must have been dearer than fame. His name is cherished where the great of the world are unknown. It is pronounced with blessings, with grateful tears, with sighs for his loss, in many an abode of sorrow and want; and how can we shut our hearts against this proof of the power of the Catholic religion to form good and great men...

"When we look back on the history of papal Rome, we see her, in the days of her power, stained with the blood of martyrs. But what then? Is it righteous to involve a whole Church in guilt, which, after all, belongs to a powerful few? Is it righteous to forget, that Protestantism too has blood on her robes? Is it righteous to forget, that Time, the greatest of reformers, has exerted his silent, purifying power, on the Catholic as well as on ourselves? Shall we refuse to see, and to own with joy, that Christianity, even under papal corruptions, puts forth a divine power? Shall we shut our eyes to the fact, that, among the clergy of the Roman Church, have risen up illustrious imitators of that magnanimous apostle, before whom Felix trembled; men, who in the presence of nobles and kings, have bowed

to God alone, have challenged for his law uncompromising homage, and rebuked in virtue's own undaunted tone triumphant guilt? Shall we shut our eyes to the fact, that, from the bosom of this Church, have gone forth missionaries to the east and to the west, whose toils and martyrdom will not be dimmed by comparison with what is most splendid in Protestant self-sacrifice. We are accustomed to refresh our piety by books which Catholics have written. Still we find one of our highest gratifications in those works of art, in which Catholic genius has embodied its sublime and touching conception, of the form and countenance of Jesus, has made us awed witnesses of his miracles and cross, companions of his apostles, and admirers, with a tender reverence, of the meek, celestial beauty of his sainted mother. With these impressions, and this experience, we cannot but lift up our voice against Protestant as well as papal intolerance."

One remark more, and we have done. Our faith has been calumniated and its features distorted to suit public interests, or individual malignity; it has been described, we have heard it done so in the pulpits of our cities, and the pulpit should be the chair of truth-we have heard it described as one mass of hopeless corruption, and therefore the generator of hopeless corruption instead of opposing reason to such calumnies, how much more satisfactory and convincing is it to oppose example; and we have one in Fenelon. In the memorable debates in the British parliament on the 'Catholic Question," when so much misrepresentation of Catholic principles, not to say morals, was resorted to, more than once, when the powers of logic have been unavailing, all the clamor about Romish corruption, has been silenced by this simple remark,-"Could that be a corrupt Church which produced a Fenelon ?"

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