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The Existence of God is a religious essay by Francois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fenelon. An ancestor of the French divine who under the name of Fenelon has made for himself a household name in England as in France, was Bertrand de Salignac, Marquis de la Mothe Fenelon, who in 1572, as ambassador for France, was charged to soften as much as he could the resentment of our Queen Elizabeth when news came of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Our Fenelon, claimed in brotherhood by Christians of every denomination, was born nearly eighty years after that time, at the chateau of Fenelon in Perigord, on the 6th of August, 1651. To the world he is Fenelon; he was Francois de Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon to the France of his own time.

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9781774416396

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Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, more commonly known as Francois Fenelon (6 August 1651 - 7 January 1715), was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer. He today is remembered mostly as the author of The Adventures of Telemachus, first published in 1699.. In about 1675, (when he would have been 24), Fenelon was ordained as a priest. He initially dreamed of becoming a missionary to the East, but instead, and at the instigation of friends, he preached in Sulpician parishes and performed routine pastoral work as his reputation for eloquence began to grow. In early 1679, Francois Harlay de Champvallon, Archbishop of Paris, selected Fenelon as director of Nouvelles-Catholiques, a community in Paris for young Huguenot girls, who had been removed from their families and were about to join the Church of Rome [3] In 1681 he published a pedagogical work Traite de l'education des filles (Treatise on the Education of Girls) which brought him much attention, not only in France, but abroad as well.[4] From 1681 to 1695, Fenelon was prior of the fortified monastery at Carennac. During this period, Fenelon had become friends with his future rival Jacques-Benigne Bossuet. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Church began a campaign to send the greatest orators in the country into the regions of France with the highest concentration of Huguenots to persuade them of the errors of Protestantism. Upon Bossuet's suggestion, Fenelon was included in this group, [4] alongside such oratorical greats as Louis Bourdaloue and Esprit Flechier. He consequently spent the next three years in the Saintonge region of France preaching to Protestants. He persuaded the king to remove troops from the region and tried to avoid outright displays of religious oppression, though, in the end, he was willing to resort to force to make Protestants listen to his message. He believed that to be obliged to do good is always an advantage and that heretics and schismatics, when forced to apply their minds to the consideration of truth, eventually lay aside their erroneous beliefs, whereas they would never have examined these matters had not authority constrained them.

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