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human courage grows magnificently to the height of human need. "I am a man," said Frederick the Great, "and therefore born to On the long agonizing death-bed, Grant showed himself every inch a hero, bearing his agonies and trials without a murmur, with rugged stoicism, in unflinching fortitude; yes, and we believe in a Christian's patience and a Christian's prayers. Which of us can tell whether those hours of torture and misery may not have been blessings in disguise; whether God may not have been refining the gold from the brass, and the strong man had been truly purified by the strong agony? We are gathered here in England to do honor to his memory and to show our sympathy with the sorrow of a great sister nation. Could we be gathered in a more fitting place? We do not lack here memorials to recall the history of your country. There is the grave of Andre; there is the monument raised by grateful Massachusetts to the gallant Howe; there is the temporary resting-place of George Peabody; there is the bust of Longfellow; over the Dean's grave there is the faint semblance of Boston Harbor. We add another memory to-day. Whatever there may have been between the two nations to forget and forgive, it is forgotten and forgiven. "I will not speak of them as two peoples," said General Grant at Newcastle in 1877, "because, in fact, we are one people, with a common destiny, and that destiny will be brilliant in proportion to the friendship and co-operation of the brethren. dwelling on each side of the Atlantic." Oh! if the two peoples, which are one people, be true to their duty, and true to their God, who can doubt that in their hands are the destinies of the world? Can anything short of utter dementation ever thwart a destiny so manifest? Your founders were our sons; it was from our past that your present grew. The monument of Sir Walter Raleigh is not that nameless grave in St. Margaret's; it is the State of Virginia. Yours and ours alike are the memories of Captain John Smith and of the Pilgrim Fathers, of General Ogle. thorpe's strong benevolence of soul, of the apostolic holiness of Berkeley, and the burning zeal of Wesley and Whitefield. Yours and ours alike are the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Milton; ours and yours alike are all that you have accomplished in literature or in history- the songs of Longfellow and Bryant, the genius of Hawthorne and of Irving, the fame of Washington, Lee, and Grant. But great memorics imply great responsibilities. It was not for nothing that God has made England what

2135 she is; not for nothing that the free individualism of a busy multitude, the humble traders of a fugitive people, snatching the New World from feudalism and bigotry, from Philip II. and Louis XIV., from Menendez and Montcalm, from the Jesuit and the Inquisition, from Torquemada, and from Richelieu, to make it the land of the Reformation and the Republic of Christianity and of Peace. "Let us auspicate all our proceedings in America," said Edmund Burke, "with the old Church cry, Sursum corda!» But it is for America to live up to the spirit of such words, not merely to quote them with proud enthusiasm. have heard of —

"New times, new climes, new lands, new men, but still
The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill."

We

It is for America to falsify the cynical foreboding. Let her take her place side by side with England in the very van of freedom and of progress, united by a common language, by common blood, by common measures, by common interests, by a common history, by common hopes; united by the common glory of great men, of which this great temple of silence and reconciliation is the richest shrine. Be it the steadfast purpose of the two peoples who are one people to show all the world not only the magnificent spectacle of human happiness, but the still more magnificent spectacle of two peoples which are one people, loving righteousness and hating iniquity, inflexibly faithful to the princi. ples of eternal justice which are the unchanging laws of God.

FRANÇOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE
FÉNELON

(1651-1715)

HE author of Telemachus, and the rival of Bossuet, Fénelon is remembered for the limpid purity of his language and

the elevation of his views of life, rather than for boldness and originality. As a man, he has been loved in his lifetime and ever since, for his unworldliness and gentleness. As an orator, he has a style of his own hardly approached by any one else. ་ cultivated man," says Matthews, "needs to be told of the sweet persuasions that dwelt upon the tongue of the swan of Cambray ?»

Fénelon was born August 6th, 1651, of a noble family, in Périgord. Always delicate and sensitive, he was greatly loved by his father, Count Pons de Salignac, who sent him first to the college at Cahors and afterwards to Paris, that he might have the best possible education. He showed his genius at an early age. It is said that at fifteen he preached a sermon which astonished and delighted his hearers. After entering the priesthood, he spent ten years as superior of the community of "Nouvelles Catholiques," an order devoted to the education of women. About this time he wrote his celebrated work, 'The Education of Young Girls;' and his 'Refutation of Malebranche. In 1685 he was sent as a missionary into districts disturbed by the religious persecutions of Louis XIV. The work he did in them was creditable, though unsatisfactory to his superior, the Archbishop of Paris.

In 1689 he was made tutor to the Dauphin, for whom he wrote his most celebrated work, 'Telemachus, a romance of the most delightful improbability, concerning which it has been asked with reason how its author could conceive the possibility of such a paragon as 'Telemachus' originating in the family of a liar so practiced, an adventurer so unscrupulous, as Ulysses boasted of being. That, however, did not concern Fénelon at all. He intended the book for the best possible sermon written in the best possible French, and succeeded so well in realizing his intention that it has outlasted the throne of the Bourbons whom he hoped by it to persuade to virtue.

In 1695 the King nominated Fénelon for the Archbishopric of Cambray, and at about the same time his celebrated controversy with

Bossuet over Quietism began to develop. It is impossible to do justice to Fénelon's position in a sentence of summary, but he seems to have believed, and with the mildness peculiar to him to have insisted that a Christian ought to live in this world as if he were in heaven - a doctrine which brought him into disgrace and resulted in his retirement to Cambray where he spent the last years of his life in teaching, preaching, feeding the hungry, and nursing the sick. He died January 7th, 1715.

THE

SIMPLICITY AND GREATNESS

(From the 'Sermons of Fénelon - Translation of Mrs. Follen)

HERE is a simplicity that is a defect, and a simplicity that is a virtue. Simplicity may be a want of discernment. When we speak of a person as simple, we may mean that he is credulous and perhaps vulgar. The simplicity that is a virtue is something sublime; every one loves and admires it; but it is difficult to say exactly what this virtue is.

Simplicity is an uprightness of soul that has no reference to self; it is different from sincerity, and it is a still higher virtue. We see many people who are sincere, without being simple they only wish to pass for what they are, and they are unwilling to appear what they are not; they are always thinking of themselves, measuring their words, and recalling their thoughts, and reviewing their actions, from the fear that they have done too much or too little. These persons are sincere, but they are not simple; they are not at ease with others, and others are not at ease with them; they are not free, ingenuous, natural; we prefer people who are less correct, less perfect, and who are less arti ficial. This is the decision of man, and it is the judgment of God, who would not have us so occupied with ourselves, and hus, as it were, always arranging our features in a mirror.

To be wholly occupied with others, never to look within, is the state of blindness of those who are entirely engrossed by what is present and addressed to their senses; this is the very reverse of simplicity. To be absorbed in self in whatever engages us, whether we are laboring for our fellow-beings or for God-to be wise in our own eyes, reserved, and full of ourselves, troubled at the least thing that disturbs our self-complacency, is the opposite extreme. This is false wisdom, which, with all its

glory, is but little less absurd than that folly which pursues only pleasure. The one is intoxicated with all that it sees around it; the other with all that it imagines it has within; but it is delirium in both. To be absorbed in the contemplation of our own minds is really worse than to be engrossed by outward things, because it appears like wisdom and yet is not; we do not think of curing it; we pride ourselves upon it; we approve of it; it gives us an unnatural strength; it is a sort of frenzy; we are not conscious of it; we are dying, and we think ourselves in health.

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Simplicity consists in a just medium, in which we are neither too much excited, nor too composed. The soul is not carried away by outward things, so that it cannot make all necessary reflections neither does it make those continual references to self, that a jealous sense of its own excellence multiplies to infinity. That freedom of the soul, which looks straight onward in its path, losing no time to reason upon its steps, to study them, or to contemplate those that it has already taken, is true simplicity. The first step in the progress of the soul is disengagement from outward things, that it may enter into itself, and contemplate its true interests: this is a wise self-love. The second is, to join to this the idea of God whom it fears: this is the feeble beginning of true wisdom: but the soul is still fixed upon itself; it is afraid that it does not fear God enough; it is still thinking of itself. These anxieties about ourselves are far removed from that peace and liberty which a true and simple love inspires; but it is not yet time for this; the soul must pass through this trouble; this operation of the spirit of God in our hearts comes to us gradually; we approach step by step to this simplicity. In the third and last state, we begin to think of God more frequently, we think of ourselves less, and insensibly we lose our

selves in him.

The more gentle and docile the soul is, the more it advances in this simplicity. It does not become blind to its own defects, and unconscious of its imperfections; it is more than ever sensible of them; it feels a horror of the slightest sin; it sees more clearly its own corruption; but this sensibility does not arise from dwelling upon itself, but by the light from the presence of God, we see how far removed we are from infinite purity.

Thus simplicity is free in its course, since it makes no preparation: but it can only belong to the soul that is purified by a

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