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The Ancien Regime by Charles Kingsley
page 52 of 89 (58%)
coadjutor, the counsellor of man. Of all problems connected with the
education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the
France of the Ancien Regime, the most important. And it was just that
which Fenelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he most
certainly could not have solved. Meanwhile, not only Madame de
Maintenon, but women whose names it were a shame to couple with hers,
must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to
dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have
been the helpmeet of the ideal king.

To those who believe that the world is governed by a living God, it may
seem strange, at first sight, that this moral anarchy was allowed to
endure; that the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the French
Revolution, inevitable from Louis XIV.'s latter years, was not allowed to
burst two generations sooner than it did. Is not the answer--that the
question always is not of destroying the world, but of amending it? And
that amendment must always come from within, and not from without? That
men must be taught to become men, and mend their world themselves? To
educate men into self-government--that is the purpose of the government
of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that
lesson. As the century rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough
in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful activity,
increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and
usefulness. With mistakes and confusions innumerable they worked: but
still they worked; planting good seed; and when the fire of the French
Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the rotten and the withered,
only to let the fresh herbage spring up from underneath.

But that purifying fire was needed. If we inquire why the many attempts
to reform the Ancien Regime, which the eighteenth century witnessed, were
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