"Take as penance for your sins," he wrote, "the disagreeable liabilities of the position you are in: the very hinderances which seem injurious to our advancement in piety turn to our profit, provided that we do what depends on ourselves.

Fail not in any of your duties towards the court, as regards your office and the proprieties, but be not anxious for posts which awaken ambition." Such are, with their discreet tolerance, the teachings of Fenelon, adapted for the guidance of the Dukes of Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, and of the Duke of Burgundy himself.

He went much further, and on less safe a road, when he was living at court, under the influence of Madame Guyon.

A widow and still young, gifted with an ardent spirit and a lofty and subtile mind, Madame Guyon had imagined, in her mystical enthusiasm, a theory of pure love, very analogous fundamentally, if not in its practical consequences, to the doctrines taught shortly before by a Spanish priest named Molinos, condemned by the court of Rome in 1687.

It was about the same time that Madame Guyon went to Paris, with her book on the _Moyen court et facile de faire l'Oraison du Coeur_ (Short and easy Method of making Orison with the Heart).