3.  “Perpetual contemplation,” making venial sins impossible, and abolishing the distinction of virtues, is impossible.

4.  “Passive prayer,” if it excludes the co-operation of free-will, is impossible.

5.  There can be no “quietude” except the peace of the Holy Ghost, which acts in a manner so uniform that these acts seem, to unscientific persons, not distinct acts, but a single and permanent unity with God.

6.  That the doctrine of pure love may not serve as an asylum for the errors of the Quietists, we assert that hope must always abide, as saith St. Paul.

7.  The state of pure love is very rare, and it is intermittent.

In reply to this manifesto, the “Three Prelates[311]” rejoin that Fenelon keeps the name of hope but takes away the thing; that he really preaches indifference to salvation; that he is in danger of regarding contemplation of Christ as a descent from the heights of pure contemplation; that he unaccountably says nothing of the “love of gratitude” to God and our Redeemer; that he “erects the rare and transient experiences of a few saints into a rule of faith.”

In this controversy about disinterested love, our sympathies are chiefly, but not entirely, with Fenelon.  The standpoint of Bossuet is not religious at all.  “Pure love,” he says almost coarsely, “is opposed to the essence of love, which always desires the enjoyment of its object, as well as to the nature of man, who necessarily desires happiness.”  Most of us will rather agree with St. Bernard, that love, as such, desires nothing but reciprocation—­“verus amor se ipso contentus est:  habet praemium, sed id quod amatur.”  If the question had been simply whether religion is or is not in its nature mercenary, we should have felt no doubt on which side the truth lay.  Self-regarding hopes and schemes may be schoolmasters to bring us to Christ; it seems, indeed, to be part of our education to form them, and then see them shattered one after another, that better and deeper hopes may be constructed out of the fragments; but a selfish Christianity is a contradiction in terms.  But Fenelon, in his teaching about disinterested love, goes further than this.  “A man’s self,” he says, “is his own greatest cross.”  “We must therefore become strangers to this self, this moi.” Resignation is not a remedy; for “resignation suffers in suffering; one is as two persons in resignation; it is only pure love that loves to suffer.”  This is the thought with which many of us are familiar in James Hinton’s Mystery of Pain.  It is at bottom Stoical or Buddhistic, in spite of the emotional turn given to it by Fenelon.  Logically, it should lead to the destruction of love; for love requires two living factors,[312] and the person who has attained a “holy indifference,” who has passed wholly out of self, is as incapable of love as of any other emotion.  The attempt “to wind ourselves too high for mortal man” has resulted, as usual,