And as to any supposed necessary relations between the very highest contemplation and the most complete state of Pure Love on the one hand, and anything abnormal or miraculous on the other hand, Fénelon, in this point remarkably more sober than Bossuet, well sums up the most authoritative and classical Church-teaching on the matter: “‘Passive’ Contemplation is but Pure Contemplation: ‘Active’ Contemplation being one which is still mixed with hurried and discursive acts. When Contemplation has ceased to have any remnant of this hurry, of this ‘activity,’ it is entirely ‘Passive,’ that is, peaceful, in its acts.” “This free and loving look of the soul means acts of the understanding,--for it is a look; and acts of the will, for the look is a loving one; and acts produced by free-will, without any strict necessity, for the look is a free look.” “We should not compare Passive Contemplation,” as did Bossuet, “to prophecy, or to the gift of tongues or of miracles; nor may we say that this mystical state consists principally in something wrought by God within us without our co-operation, and where, consequently, there neither is nor can be any merit. We must, on the contrary, to speak correctly, say that the substance of such Passive Prayer, taken in its specific acts, is free, meritorious, and operated within us by a grace that acts together with us.” “It is the attraction to the acts which the soul now produces which, as by a secondary and counter-effect, occasions a quasi-incapacity for those acts which it does not produce. Now this attraction is not of a kind to deprive the soul of the use of its free-will: we see this from the nature of the acts which this attraction causes the soul to produce. Whence I conclude that this same attraction does not, again, deprive it of its liberty with regard to the acts which it prevents. The attraction but prevents the latter in the way it produces the other,--by an efficacious influence that involves no sheer necessity.” “‘Passivity,’ if it comes from God, ever leaves the soul fully free for the exercise of the distinct virtues demanded by God in the Gospel; the _attrait_ is truly divine only in so far as it draws the soul on to the perfect fulfilment of the evangelical counsels and promises concerning all the virtues.” “The inspiration of the Passive state is but an habitual inspiration for the interior acts of evangelical piety. It renders the Passive soul neither infallible nor impeccable, nor independent of the Church even for its interior direction, nor exempt from the obligation of meriting and growing in virtue.… The inspiration of the passive soul differs from that of actively just souls only in being purer; that is, more exempt from all natural self-seeking, more full, more simple, more continuous, and more developed at each moment. We have, throughout, ever one and the same inspiration, which but grows in perfection and purity in proportion as the soul renounces itself more, and becomes