Fénelon was grounded not only in the practice of piety and priestly virtue, but above all in solid Catholic doctrine, which saved him later from Jansenism and Gallicanism. Thirty years later, in a letter to Clement XI, he congratulates himself on his training by M. Tronson in the knowledge of his Faith and the duties of the ecclesiastical life. About 1675 he was ordained priest and for a while thought of devoting himself to the Eastern missions. This was, however, only a passing inclination. Instead he joined the commuity of Saint Sulpice and gave himself up to the works of the priesthood especially preaching and catechizing.

When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, by which Henry IV had granted freedom of public worship to the Protestants, missionaries were chosen from among the greatest orators of the day, e.g. Bourdaloue, Fléchier, and others, and were sent to those parts of France where heretics were most numerous, to labour for their conversion. At the suggestion of his friend Bossuet, Fénelon was sent with five companions to Santonge, where he manifested great zeal, though his methods were always tempered by gentleness. According to Cardinal de Bausset, he induced Louis XIV to remove all troops and all evidences of compulsion from the places he visited, and it is certain that he proposed and insisted on many methods of which the king did not approve. "When hearts are to be moved", he wrote to Seignelay," force avails not. Conviction is the only real conversion". Instead of force he employed patience, established classes, and distributed New Testaments and catechisms in the vernacular. Above all, he laid especial emphasis on preaching provided the sermons were by gentle preachers who have a faculty not only for instructing but for winning the confidence of their hearers". It is doubtless true, as recently published documents prove, that he did not altogether repudiate measures of force, but he only allowed them as a last resource.

......... Before and after his mission at Saintonge, which lasted but a few months (1686-1687), Fénelon formed many dear friendships. Bossuet was already his friend, the great bishop was at the summit of his fame, and was everywhere looked up to as the oracle of the Church of France. Fénelon showed him the utmost deference, visited him at his country-house at Germany, and assisted at his spiritual conferences and his lectures on the Scriptures at Versailles. .......

The Duc de Beauvilliers, who had been the first to test in his own family the value of the "Traité de l'education des filles", was in 1689 named governor of the grandchildren of Louis XIV. He hastened to secure Fénelon as tutor to the eldest of these princes, the Duke of Burgundy. It was a most important post, seeing that the formation of the future King of France lay in his hands; but it was not without great difficulties, owing to the violent, haughty, and character of the pupil. ......... Fénelon prepared them the better to his plans. With the same object in view, he wrote his "Fables" and his "Dialogues des Morts", but especially his "Télémaque", in which work, under the guise of pleasant fiction, he taught the young prince lessons of self-control, and all the duties required by his exalted position. The results of this training were wonderful. The historian Saint-Simon, as a rule hostile to Fénelon, says: "De cet abîme sortit un prince, affable, doux, modéré, humain, patient, humble, tout appliqué à ses devoirs." It has been asked in our day if Fénelon did not succeed too well. ........

To reward the tutor, Louis XIV gave him, in 1694, the Abbey of Saint-Valéry, with its annual revenue of fourteen thousand livres. The Académie had opened its doors to him and Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of the king, began to consult him on matters of conscience, and on the regulation of the house of Saint-Cyr, which she had just established for the training of young girls. Soon afterwards the archiepiscopal See of Cambrai, one of the best in France, fell vacant, and the king offered it to Fénelon, at the same time expressing a wish that he would continue to instruct the Duke of Burgundy. Nominated in February, 1696, Fénelon was consecrated in August of the same year by Bossuet in the chapel of Saint-Cyr. The future of the young prelate looked brilliant, when he fell into deep disgrace.

The cause of Fénelon's trouble was his connection with Madame Guyon, whom he had met in the society of his friends, the Beauvilliers and the Chevreuses. She was a native of Orléans, which she left when about twenty-eight years old, a widowed mother of three children, to carry on a sort of apostolate of mysticism, under the direction of Père Lacombe, a Barnabite. After many journeys to Geneva, and through Provence and Italy, she set forth her ideas in two works, "Le moyen court et facile de faire oraison" and "Les torrents spirituels". In exaggerated language characteristic of her visionary mind, she presented a system too evidently founded on the Quietism of Molinos, that had just been condemned by Innocent XI in 1687. There were, however, great divergencies between the two systems. Whereas Molinos made man's earthly perfection consist in a state of uninterrupted contemplation and love, which would dispense the soul from all active virtue and reduce it to absolute inaction, Madame Guyon rejected with horror the dangerous conclusions of Molinos as to the cessation of the necessity of offering positive resistance to temptation. Indeed, in all her relations with Père Lacombe, as well as with Fénelon, her virtuous life was never called in doubt. Soon after her arrival in Paris she became acquainted with many pious persons of the court and in the city, among them Madame de Maintenon and the Ducs de Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, who introduced her to Fénelon. In turn, he was attracted by her piety, her lofty spirituality, the charm of her personality, and of her books. It was not long, however, before the Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was, began to unsettle the mind of Madame de Maintenon by questioning the orthodoxy of Madame Guyon's theories. ........... Madame Guyon submitted to the condemnation, but her teaching spread in England, and Protestants, who have had her books reprinted have always expressed sympathy with her views. Cowper translated some of her hymns into English verse; and her autobiography was translated into English by Thomas Digby (London, 1805) and Thomas Upam (New York, 1848). Her books have been long forgotten in France.

......... He distrusted all religious novelties, and he reproached Bossuet with not having warned him of the ideas of his grandsons' tutor. He appointed the Bishops of Meaux, Chartes, and Paris to examine Fénelon's work and select passages for condemnation, but Fénelon himself submitted the book to the judgement of Holy See (27 April, 1697). A vigorous conflict broke out at once, particularly between Bossuet and Fénelon. Attack and reply followed too fast for analysis here. The works of Fénelon on the subject fill six volumes, not to speak of the 646 letters relating to Quietism, the writer proving himself a skillful polemical writer, deeply versed in spiritual things, endowed with quick intelligence and a mental suppleness not always to be clearly distinguished from quibbling and a straining of the sense. After a long and detailed examination by the consultors and cardinals of the Holy Office, lasting over two years and occupyng 132 sessions, "Les Maxims des Saints" was finally condemned (12 March, 1699) as containing propositions which, in the obvious meaning of the words, or else because of the sequence of the thoughts, were "temerarious, scandalous, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, pernicious in practice, and false in fact". Twenty-three propositions were selected as having incurred this censure, but the pope by no means intended to imply that he approved the rest of the book. Fénelon submitted at once. "We adhere to this brief", he wrote in a pastoral letter in which he made known Rome's decision to the flock, "and we accept it not only for the twenty three propositions but for the whole book, simply, absolutely, and without a shadow of reservation." Most of his contemporaries found his submission adequate, edifying and admirable. In recent times, however, scattered letters have enabled a few critics to doubt its sincerity. In our opinion a few words written impulsively, and contradicted by the whole tenor of the writers's life, cannot justify so grave a charge. It must be remembered, too, that at the meeting of the bishops held to receive the Brief of condemnation, Fénelon declared that he laid aside his own opinion and accepted the judgement of Rome, and that if this act of submission seemed lacking in any way, he was ready to do whatever Rome would suggest. The Holy See never required anything more than the above-mentioned spontaneous act.

Louis XIV, who had done all he could to bring the condemnation of the "Maximes des Saints", had already punished its author by ordering him to remain within the limits of his diocese. Vexed later at the publication of "Télémaque", in which he saw his person and his government subjected to criticism, the king could never be prevailed upon to revoke this command. Fénelon submitted without complaint or regret, and gave himself up entirely to the care of his flock. With a revenue of two hundred thousand livres and eight hundred parishes, some of which were on Spanish territory, Cambrai, which had been regained by France only in 1678, was one of the most important sees in the kingdom......

Fénelon was always approachable, and on his walks often conversed with those he chanced to meet. He loved to visit the peasants in their houses, interested himself in their joys and sorrows, and, to avoid paining them, accepted the simple gifts of their hospitality. During the War of the Spanish Succession the doors of his palace were open to all the poor who took refuge in Cambrai. The rooms and stairways were filled with them, and his gardens and vestibules sheltered their live stock. He is yet remembered in the vicinity of Cambrai and the peasants still give their children the name Fénelon, as that of a saint.

........... At this very time the Duc d'Orléans, the future regent was consulting him on quite different subjects. This prince, a sceptic through circumstances rather than by any force of reasoning, profited by the appearance of Fénelon's "Traité de l'existence de Dieu" to ask its author some questions on the worship due to God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. Fénelon replied in a series of letters, only the first three of which are answers to the difficulties proposed by the prince. Together they form a continuation of the "Traité de l'existence de Dieu", the first part of which had been published in 1712 without Fénelon's knowledge. The second part appeared only in 1718, after its author's death. Though an almost forgotten work of his youth, it was received with much approval, and was soon translated into English and German. It is from his letters and this treatise that we learn something about the philosophy of Fénelon. It borrows from both St. Augustine and Descartes. For Fénelon the strongest arguments for the existence of God were those based on final causes and on the idea of the infinite, both developed along broad lines and with much literary charm, rather than with precision or originality.

Fénelon's last years were saddened by the death of his best friends. Towards the end of 1710 he lost Abbe de Langeron, his lifelong companion; in February, 1712, his pupil, the Duke of Burgundy, died. A few months later the Duc de Chevreuse was taken away, and the Duc de Beauvilliers followed in August, 1714. Fénelon survived him only a few months, making a last request to Louis XIV to appoint a successor firm against Jansenism, and to favour the introduction of Sulpicians into his seminary. With him disappeared one of the most illustrious members of the French episcopate, certainly one of the most attractive men of his age. He owed his success solely to his great talents and admirable virtues.

The most convenient and best edition of Fénelon's works is that begun by Lebel at Versailles in 1820 and completed at Paris by Leclere in 1830. It comprises twenty-two volumes, besides eleven volumes of letters, in all thirty-three volumes, not including an index volume. The various works are grouped under five five headings: (I) Theological and controversial works (Vols. I-XVI), of which the principal are: "Traité de l'existence et des attributs de Dieu", letters on various metaphysical and religious subjects; "Traité du ministère des pasteurs"; "De Summi Pontificis auctoritate", "Réfutation du système du P. Malebranche sur la nature et la grâce"; "Lettre à l'Evêque d'Arras sur la lecture de l'Ecriture Sainte en langue vulgaire", works on Quietisin and Jansenism. (2) Works on moral and spiritual subjects (Vols. XVII and XVIII): "Traité de l'éducation des filles"; sermons and works on piety. (3) Twenty-four pastoral charges (XVIII). (4) Literary works (Vols. XIX-XXII): "Dialogues des Morts"; "Télémaque"; "Dialogues sur l'éloquence". (5) Political writings (Vol. XXII): "Examen de conscience sur les devoirs de la Royauté"; various memoirs on the War of the Spanish Succession; "Plans du Gouvernement concertes avec le Duc de Chevreuse". The correspondence includes letters to friends at court, as Beauvilliers, Chevreuse, and the Duke of Burgundy; letters of direction, and letters on Quietism. To these must be added the "Explication des rnaximes des Saints sur la vie lnterieure" (Paris, 1697).