Even against the Jansenists, who were fierce Augustinians, the ultra Calvinists of that time in the matter of the Divine decrees, and whom he thoroughly disliked, being himself a firm friend of free will, he would by no means have harsh measures taken. The sweetness of his disposition and his idea of the meekness of God, made him strongly averse to the doctrines of Quesnel and Jansen, which he considered as leading to despair. “God,” he said, “is to them only a terrible Being; to me He is a Being good and just. I can not consent to make Him a tyrant who binds us with fetters, and then commands us to walk, and punishes us if we do not.” In this he was at one with John Wesley. But he would not, any more than the Methodist, permit persecution of them in his diocese. “Let us,” said he, “be to them what they are unwilling that God should be to man, full of compassion and indulgence.” He was told that the Jansenists were his declared enemies, that they left nothing undone to bring him and his doctrine into discredit. “That is one further reason,” said he, “for me to suffer and forgive them.” On hearing that some peasants in Hainaut, who were descended from Protestants, and who held still the same opinions, had received the sacrament from a minister of their own persuasion, but that, when discovered, they disguised their sentiments and even went to mass, he said to the Reformed minister: “Brother, you see what has happened. It is full time that these good people should have some fixed religion; go and obtain their names, and those of all their families; I give you my word that in less than six months they shall all have passports”—that is, to go where they like. The same clergyman, whose name was Brunice, he received at his table as a brother, and treated him with great kindness. To an officer of the army who consulted him to know what course he should adopt with such of his soldiers as were Huguenots, Fénelon answered: “Tormenting and teasing heretic soldiers into conversion, will answer no end; it will not succeed; it will only produce hypocrites. The converts so made will desert in crowds.”