The great world will presently involve Fenelon in the currents of
history. Louis XIV., grown old, and become as selfishly greedy now of
personal salvation as all his life he had been selfishly greedy of
personal glory, seeks that object of his soul by serving the Church in
the wholesale conversion of Protestants. He revokes the Edict of Nantes,
which had secured religious toleration for the realm, and proceeds to
dragoon the Huguenots into conformity with the Roman Catholic Church.
The reaction in public sentiment against such rigors grew a cry that had
to be silenced. Fenelon was selected to visit the heretic provinces, and
win them to willing submission. He stipulated that every form of
coercion should cease, and went to conquer all with love. His success
was remarkable. But not even Fenelon quite escaped the infection of
violent zeal for the Church. It seems not to be given to any man to rise
wholly superior to the spirit of the world in which he lives.
The luster of Fenelon's name, luminous from the triumphs of his mission
among the Protestants, was sufficient to justify the choice of this man,
a man both by nature and by culture so ideally formed for the office as
was he, to be tutor to the heir prospective of the French monarchy. The
Duke of Burgundy, grandson to Louis XIV., was accordingly put under the
charge of Fenelon to be trained for future kingship. Never, probably, in
the history of mankind, has there occurred a case in which the victory
of a teacher could be more illustrious than actually was the victory of
Fenelon as teacher to this scion of the house of Bourbon. We shall be
giving our readers a relishable taste of St. Simon, the celebrated
memoir-writer of the age of Louis XIV., if out of the portrait in
words, drawn by him from life, of Fenelon's princely pupil, we transfer
here a few strong lines to our pages. St. Simon says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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