loving than love, his daily life more kind than kindness, his words truer than truth itself.” Lamartine calls him “beautiful as a Raphael’s St. John leaning on the bosom of Christ.” He had the imagination of a woman for dreaming of heaven, and the soul of a man for subduing the earth. The especially feminine qualities were prominent in him, yet he strikes no one as effeminate, and when he felt himself set for the defense of the truth he showed a power that greatly surprised his enemies. “His soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” “alone with the Alone.” And yet he was so deeply interested in the welfare of France and his fellow-men that he has been called a politician; statesman would be the word more befitting the facts, for his ideas as to the measures and policies necessary to make the land prosperous were in the main very wise, and he had no personal ends to serve. In whatever capacity we consider him—poet, orator, moralist, metaphysician, politician, instructor, bishop, friend, persecuted Christian—he excites our keenest interest, our warmest admiration. He greatly desired to please every one, and succeeded so far as circumstances allowed; but the desire was held in strictest control by a strong sense of duty, which compelled him at times to do and say things most unacceptable to many. He was no courtier, no flatterer, he could not make his own interests the first consideration. He was a prophet in Gomorrah, charged with a message which pressed upon him for utterance, and for the delivery of which the time was short. At the court of Louis XIV—a spot above all others on the face of the earth, perhaps, in that century, disgraced by selfishness, hypocrisy, and intrigue—he bears not a little resemblance to a seraph sent on a divine mission to the shades of the lost. There is endless fascination in his story. He was not without faults, but his faults were those of his age; his virtues were his own. He turned a haughty, irritable, overbearing young prince, an incipient Cæsar Borgia, into the mildest, most docile, obedient of men. He possessed his soul in peace amid provocations that would have been far too much for most of us. Neither public disgrace nor personal bereavement had power to embitter him. He listened to the voice of God within him, and marched straight on, breast forward. In the language of Herder, “His Church indeed canonized him not, but humanity has.” He is a saint in the eyes of multitudes not attracted by official sanctity; an apostle of liberty that dared withstand the Grand Monarque; a martyr spending half a life in exile, through the machinations of a court faction which dreaded his incorruptible goodness. “Being dead, he yet speaketh.” “One of the noblest men who ever lived,” says Dr. John Henry Kurtz, the distinguished Church historian. Joseph de Maistre exclaims: “Do we wish to paint ideal greatness? Let us try to imagine something that surpasses Fénelon—we shall not succeed.” Let us, then, putting aside imagination,