Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/444

 eighteenth century, in the lives and writings of Madame Guyon and Archbishop Fénelon. Nothing purer and more elevated had appeared in the Church. Nothing perhaps has exercised greater influence for good both in the Catholic and in the Protestant Churches, to this day. Yet their substitution of inward, spontaneous, fervid prayer in place of the formalities of the Church was thought to interfere with its power, and Madame Guyon and the good Archbishop both fell under its condemnation,—the one being sent to pass her days in a dungeon, the other meekly bowing in submission to the Holy See.

It is remarkable that the Moravians, under Zinzendorf, with their ecstatic profession of affectional union with their Saviour, attracted the interest first of Wesley and somewhat later of Swedenborg, at their meetings in London. Wesley was much influenced by them, about the beginning of his great revival, in 1738; but Swedenborg soon discovered their insincerity and denounced them, for which he was denounced in turn. Of the great movement set on foot by the Wesleys and Whitefield it is to be remembered that nothing equal in extent and power had occurred since the Reformation. And indeed it was, with Pietism, a reformation like that of John the Baptist in the wilderness, laying low the mountains and raising up the valleys in preparation for what was to come.

conditions of a consummation are as obvious in the causes of the French Revolution as in the catastrophe itself. Among these causes we may reckon first the oppression of the laboring class by Church and State and Gentry, all for mere voluptuous indulgence. Fénelon wrote to the king,—

"Your people are dying of hunger. The tillage of the land is almost abandoned. Towns and villages are being depopulated. All the trades languish and no longer feed the workmen. . . . In place of drawing money from this poor people, they ought to receive alms and be fed. All France is nothing now but a great hospital, stripped and without provisions. Popular movements, which had been long unknown, are becoming frequent. . . . You are reduced to the deplorable extremity, either of leaving sedition unpunished, or of massacring the people whom you drive to