CHAPTER IV.

THE GALLICAN CHURCH.

DURING the first half of the seventeenth century French religion went through a somewhat chaotic stage. Catholicism had triumphed under Henry IV, but the whole reign of his successor was taken up by discussions as to the particular form which Catholicism should assume. For a long while the country swung to and fro between two rival schools of extremists, neither of which was strong enough to crush the other. At one end of the line was the ultra-clerical party headed successively by Mary de' Medici and Anne of Austria. At the opposite end were the upholders of a purely official religion ; their strength lay chiefly in the legal and administrative class, which Richelieu had raised to power. They were ready enough to call themselves Catholics, and " perform the ancient ceremonies of their country with a decent moderation," as one of their own great writers enjoins. But they insisted that Catholicism should be kept under the strict surveillance of the civil powers ; its profession was not so much a duty to God as a duty to the State. Their real religion they found in the books of such men as Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621), Bishop of Lisieux and Lord Keeper during the regency of Mary de' Medici. He offered them a purely natural religion, set out in singularly impressive language largely borrowed from the ancient Stoics. Intensely moral and patriotic, it is touched throughout with Christian sentiment ; but it owes quite as much to Epictetus as to the Sermon on the Mount.

That was matter of faith, not reason ; and he only dealt with the domain where philosophy and religion overlapped. Hereupon followed the natural result. Most Cartesian imaginations fastened on the truths of reason, and but little occupied themselves with those of faith. The first were the essentials of religion, the second its accidental clothing, mere " ancient ceremonies of one's country."

Not that this consequence showed itself at once. Churchmen were a long while in deciding whether Cartcsianism did more good or harm. The great Jansenist, Antoine Arnauld, spoke up warmly in its favour. Bossuet was much more doubtful ; but Pascal was the one Christian thinker of the age who steadily opposed it. Nor were the rationalists themselves quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight no one looks more negative than Gui Patin (1601-72), an eminent, but very cross-grained, professor from the College de France. He was always congratulating himself on being " delivered from the nightmare " ; and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn he pours on priests, monks, and especially " that black Loyolitic scum from Spain," which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was no freethinker. Sceptics who made game of the kernel of religion came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who dared defend its husks. His letters end with the characteristic confession : " Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc., .........De minimis non curât praetor.'''1

At the opposite pole from Patin stood the party of the so-called dévots. Patronised successively by the two foreign queens, its first object was to introduce new fashions in devotion, and new religious orders, from Italy or Spain. For French religion and French literature were alike impoverished, and must borrow from abroad. The dévots were only doing in one field what préciosité accomplished in another, when it brought in gongorisme, or exaggerated emphasis, from beyond the Pyrenees, and little concetti from beyond the Alps. In neither case did native taste take altogether kindly to the loan. The Bare-footed Carmelites, for instance, were brought to France under the patronage of one queen, and warmly encouraged by the other. Daughters of St Teresa, they represented the fine flower of the Spanish Counter-reformation. They brought with them a glow of torrid romance, that sat well enough on the countrywomen of Don Quixote, but was utterly out of place in the Paris of Descartes and Gui Patin. Their religion was all violent contrasts of light and shade. In their churches was great show of perfumes, flowers, and fine linen ; in their cloisters extraordinary austerities-terrible scourgings, the most humiliating penances, and fasts on bread and water. Louise de La Vallière, flying from the arms of Louis XIV to scrub floors in a Carmelite convent, is a typical example of their picturesque sensationalism.

The Liberties in question were certain ancient rights, in which most Frenchmen took a patriotic pride. They were peculiar to France ; and, as the Crown lawyers said, they had never been granted like a privilege, but grew up in the very nature of things. They consisted chiefly in four points. Papal bulls might not come into France without leave of the Crown. The decisions of the Roman Congregations had no legal weight in France. French subjects could not be cited before a Roman tribunal. French civil Courts took cognisance of ecclesiastical affairs, whenever the law of the land was thought to be broken. And, inasmuch as Catholicism was part and parcel of the common law, the Parlements could, and did, give this last article a very wide extension. They were perfectly ready to enter into the merits of an excommunication, and force Bishops and Cardinals to withdraw it, if they thought it improperly launched. There are even cases in which they "adjudged" the sacrament to those who could not obtain it from their parish priest.

All these things inspired a strong dislike of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Dogmatically speaking, Frenchmen thought it unhistorical, and opposed to the ancient traditions of their Church. Administratively speaking, it meant a revolution. Hitherto they had settled their ecclesiastical disputes at home. Once admit infallibility, and appeals innumerable would go from their own highly competent tribunals to a set of incapable judges in a foreign land. Lastly, Bellarmin and the Roman Ultramon-tanes had grafted on to the theological dogma a set of political consequences highly exasperating to French national pride. It was argued that ecclesiastical interests took precedence of all other interests ; and of these the Pope was the only judge. Hence he had a right to dictate his will to temporal sovereigns, whenever he thought such interests were concerned. If they refused to listen, he could punish them in any manner he thought fit ; in the last resort he could depose them, incite their subjects to rebellion, and head a crusade of Catholic Powers against them.

Much of this, no doubt, was simply dialectical steam, blown off by heated professors in a class-room. But steam can drive small wheels as well as great. The French Ministers knew very well that Ultramontanism could not depose Louis XIII from his throne; it could, and did, write seditious pamphlets, whenever Richelieu supported a Protestant Power against a Catholic. But in their foreign policy, at any rate, Richelieu and his successors meant to keep their hands entirely free ; here they must be able to ignore ecclesiastical interests as much as they pleased without fear of ecclesiastical disturbance. Hence the need of a doctrine that would bind the consciences of all Frenchmen to obey no master but their King.

For a new era was dawning. On the divisions of the Wars of Religion there followed an irresistible reaction towards patriotism and national unity. France had suddenly grown to her full stature; like the contemporary England of John Milton, she was become "a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep." Ultramontanism strove hard to check what it called this "separatist" tendency, and to strangle national aspirations in the leading-strings of the Papacy. But even the clergy were swept away by the current, and meant to be patriots like everyone else. " Before my ordination," said Richer, "I was a subject of the King of France. Why should that ceremony make me a subject of the Pope?" His eccentric follower, Michael Chrétien, went further still, and exhorted the assembled Sorbonne to rally to the service of its King. " Exhibeamus nos gallos, et non gallinas" he cried. Before long the Gallican wave had invaded the Jesuits themselves. When Louis XIV, after a period of diplomatic coolness, again sent an ambassador to Alexander VII, Father Rapin overflows about his royal condescension in thus " honouring " the Pope. And in the great quarrel with Innocent XI the Society was among the strongest supporters of the Crown.

Gallicanism necessarily led up to the doctrine of the divine right of Lings. This doctrine is developed by Bossuet in his Politique tirée de rÉcriture Sainte, written between 1675 and 1680, while the author was tutor to Louis XIV's only son. But Bossuet by no means followed the same lines as his contemporaries across the Channel. The theologians of Charles II upheld the divine right of legitimate monarchy, as opposed to other forms of government. Bossuet's object was to show that all established sovereignties-whether monarchical or republican-hold their power directly of God, and not mediately through the Pope. God wills that in every country there should be some settled constitution ; what particular form it takes the customs of the country will decide. But, once a particular form of government has established its prescriptive right, no power on earth can interfere either with the system itself or with its lawfully-appointed officers ; a bad, but legitimate, king can no more be exchanged for a good than an established republic can transform itself into a monarchy. In short, Bossuefs book is a plea for political stability at all costs. He was old enough to remember the Fronde, and the misery its flighty constitutional experiments brought upon the common folk. He was writing a manual for the son of Louis XIV at a time when Louis' methods of government had culminated in a blaze of glory. Naturally he wished those methods to continue for ever.

The clergy, in fact, were supernumerary members of the civil service. By the Concordat of 1516 the Crown appointed to all bishoprics and abbeys. But the mere nomination was the least part of the business ; the real strength of the Crown lay in its power to raise or lower clerical incomes as it pleased. It could burden an incoming bishop's revenues with pensions to whomsoever it chose ; it could reward good service with fat sinecures. Of these the most important were the abbeys in commendam. They could be granted to whomsoever the King chose. No residence, or other duty, was expected from the abbot. He need not be in holy orders ; he might be a child, or even a Huguenot. Indeed, he could be anything except a monk ; for if a qualified person were appointed, the abbey was "restored to rule," and further abuse became impossible.

Still more curious was the royal perquisite of the régale, or right to the temporalities of a vacant bishopric. Of these by far the most important was the patronage of benefices in the bishop's gift-chiefly canonries, archdeaconries, and a host of minor appointments in cathedral and collegiate churches. Parochial livings were excluded, as directly involving cure of souls. In the hands of successive generations of Crown lawyers this prerogative was developed to an incredible extent. It was held that prescription could not be pleaded against the Crown ; hence, if a benefice once fell under the régale, there it remained, until the Crown had exercised its right. As a matter of grace, the Crown seldom interfered with a dignitary who had been in possession of his stall for thirty years ; but at any time within that period an episcopally-appointed canon was liable to ejectment, on the ground that the patronage of his place rightfully belonged to the Crown. Hence, to present a man to a canonry was often equivalent to presenting him to a costly lawsuit.

These non-resident pluralists were divided by a yawning gulf from the humble country curates. Most of these were miserably poor-even poorer, relatively speaking, than their successors in modern France. Of education they had little ; no means existed for obtaining it. The Sorbonne, or theological faculty of Paris University, gave an elaborate education in divinity; but very few young men could afford to spend seven years over their degree. Few of the provincial universities taught theology at all ; and seminaries, or diocesan colleges preparing directly for the priesthood, were only just beginning to be founded. On the other hand, the Bishops expected nothing more from a candidate for holy orders than some evidence to character and enough Latin to stumble through a few lines of the Breviary. Hence the most astounding ignorance was common enough. Priests were found who did not know the common formula of absolution. St Vincent de Paul had much trouble in persuading others that they ought not to take money for hearing confessions. Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, came across a priest in his parish, who was in the habit of praying to St Beelzebub.

The awakening of these poor curates and their flocks became the favourite project of St Vincent de Paul (1576-1660). His Lazarists, or Priests of the Mission, were to evangelise the country districts ; his Sisters of Charity were to relieve their temporal distresses. These two bodies represent the triumph of two important innovations. The old-fashioned nun had spent her whole time behind high walls in prayer and contemplation ; the one object of the Sister of Charity was the service of her neighbours. The first aim of an old-fashioned Order was to make itself independent of all existing authorities ; St Vincent's two institutions were expressly intended to collaborate with the Bishops and parochial clergy.

Mabillon and Malebranche only touched the few ; the education of the mass of the clergy fell into the hands of the Sulpicians, founded by the Abbé Olier in 1641, and the Eudists (1643), so called from their founder, the Abbé Eudes de Mézerai. Following their lead came the Christian Brothers (1680), an association of celibate laymen, who furnished teachers for the humbler class of schools. But all three bodies laid much more stress on piety than on learning; Saint-Sulpice, in particular, devoted itself "not so much to theological science, as to the practice of that science, and the virtues proper to the clerical state.1'

An abounding interest in applied religion marks the whole revival. Perhaps its most characteristic outcome was the rise of professed Directors of Conscience-divines who specialised in spiritual ailments ; they stood to ordinary confessors much as a consulting physician stands to a general practitioner. No doubt, their rise was not an altogether healthy sign, and a director often aggravated the ills he was sent to cure. He became the natural target for all the morbid scrupulosity and self-analysis which idle and luxurious lives produce. Fénelon, a great expert in these matters, has many hard things to say about the valetudinarians in soul, who felt their pulses twenty times a day, and sent continually to the director to beg new drugs, or promises of quick recovery. But the prominence of Direction was a strong acknowledgment of the need of personal religion. It was felt, on the one hand, that something more than routine religious duties was demanded of the laity ; it was felt, on the other, that they could not be trusted to pick out the vital elements in religion for themselves. Some were too feeble, others too erratic. Hence the use of a Director. He kept flightiness from trying dangerous experiments, and broke up the bread of doctrine into morsels suited to a feeble appetite.

Preachers and Directors might make much of personal religion ; but there was a general tendency to treat it as the crown and flower of religion, rather than as its root. For any high degree of sanctity it was indispensable ; but it was thought that a man could scrape into a humble place in Paradise without possessing even its germs. This view was more especially common among the Jesuits. Not that it was peculiar to them. The Jesuits have invented little ; but their energy, their boldness, their elastic organisation, unfettered by any ancient traditions, make them peculiarly conspicuous champions of whatever ideas they may adopt. In this matter of personal piety their sympathies were specially engaged. It appealed to individual experience, and such experience had been the great weapon of Luther and Calvin. But the Jesuits were sworn enemies of the Reformation and all its works ; they boasted that they were nothing that Protestantism was, and all that Protestantism was not. Then, too, individual experience was cloudy and anarchic. But the Jesuits were essentially a combatant body, brought up to a more than military discipline; their sympathies were all for military precision-dogmas as clear-cut as a proposition of Euclid. Pascal might object that in religion what is clear-cut and precise is seldom true ; but Jesuits had no time to listen to such scruples. Practical efficiency was their aim ; and efficiency required a positive base of operations. Hence they were for ever extending the scope of papal infallibility.

These writers developed a whole system of expedients for protecting the penitent from a too zealous confessor. The kind of question he might ask was carefully defined. He must not cast about for general information as to his penitent's disposition, as would a physician ; he must try each offence strictly on its merits, as would a magistrate. He must always lean towards the most " benign " interpretation of the law ; and for his guidance casuistry ran many an ingenious coach and four through inconvenient enactments. In matters of detail most of these are harmless enough. They are chiefly concerned with proving that common peccadilloes-the white lies of the lady of fashion, the "trade customs " of the shopkeeper-are not grievous sins. Nevertheless, in the opinion of Pascal, Milton, and other contemporary critics, the Casuists degraded morality. They encouraged men to take over their ideas of right and wrong ready-made from the priest, and thus save themselves the trouble of thinking. As Milton said, their conscience became a " dividual moveable," left entirely in charge of the priest. He, in his turn, must be content with a low quality of achievement. He might urge his penitents to do more ; but human nature seldom resists the charms of a fixed standard-least of all, when it is administered by a live judge in a visible court. If he must be satisfied with little, why be at the trouble of offering more ? But the less he could expect from them, the more he was driven to trust to the miraculous efficiency of sacramental grace. By hook or by crook get the sinner to confession, and the whole work was done. However bad his natural character, the magical words of absolution would make him a new man.

Not that Jansen or his masters had any conscious tendencies to Protestantism. They might be willing to encounter the Reformation by its own weapons, and show that Catholic Louvain could be quite as evangelical as Presbyterian Leyden. But party-feeling was kept hot on both sides by continual border-affrays ; Jansen himself had a long battle with the learned Calvinist, Voetius, still remembered as an antagonist of Descartes. This double line of warfare shaped the ideals of the two friends ; they were in search of a theology which should be Catholic, but not Jesuit-evangelical, but not Protestant. They found it in the writings of St Augustine, who offered them a strongly individualistic mystical religion, dexterously interwoven with a high sacramental theory of the Church.

Thus Jansen's doctrine of conversion melted into Predestination. God calls certain souls to Himself; the rest He leaves to perish in their sins. Surprise has sometimes been expressed that Jansen should have made so many converts to so terrible a doctrine ; even in his own day Deists had arisen to protest against a God, whose "justice" human misery exalted, whose "essence" human ills enriched. But the mass of Frenchmen conceived of their Maker as a hypostatised absolute sovereign : like the Louis XIV of Saint-Simon, He " commanded, and gave His reasons to none." Moreover, Jansen's doctrine of conversion softened the grimness of his predestinarianism. A man might be unregenerate to-day; but to-morrow it might please God to convert him-as once He converted St Paul, "model of all penitents." But Jansen's real object was to teach men that they cannot make their own religion for themselves. Left to their undisciplined fancy, they were straying on every side ; some were experimenting with the geometrical God of Descartes, others with some Ultramontane " girdle of St Margaret." Jansen answered that they cannot choose how, or when, they will be pious : they must wait till their Maker touches their heart, and tells them what He would have them do. "Those who really long for God," said Pascal, " long also to approach Him only by means He has Himself ordained."

Augustinus, all relating to Predestination. This censure, backed by the signatures of eighty-five Bishops, was sent up to Rome for confirmation ; and in 1653 Innocent X declared all five propositions heretical.

His judgment put the Jansenists between two fires. To accept it meant a surrender of their whole position; to reject it would put them outside the Roman Church. Accordingly they temporised. They accepted the censure in the abstract, but denied that Jansen had held the propositions in the sense condemned. In one sense this was true; for a book may well mean one thing to spiritual experience, and quite another to an ecclesiastical lawyer. But the authorities could not be expected to listen to such reasoning; in 1656 Arnauld was expelled from the Sorbonne, in spite of Pascal's Provincial Letters, begun in an attempt to save him. The Letters (1656-7) soon leave Arnauld behind, however, and go on to a general attack on Jesuit casuistry and dévotion aisée.

In October, 1656, Alexander VII cut away the ground from under Arnauld's feet by declaring that his predecessor had condemned the Augustinus in the sense intended by Jansen. Arnauld promptly set up the legal distinction of law and fact. In matters of dogma, he said, the Church was certainly infallible ; but about the private intentions of an author it knew no more than anyone else. However, the authorities were obdurate. A "formulary," or declaration that the Augustinus had been rightly condemned in the sense intended by its author, was presently drawn up ; and signature was made binding on all nuns as well as priests. At first, however, it was only imposed on suspected Jansenists (1661), most of whom refused to sign. The priests went into hiding; and the Government began to persecute the nuns of Port-Royal. But in 1665 Pope and King resolved to make signature really universal. Hereupon four Bishops protested-those of Alet, Angers, Beauvais, Pamiers-and were only induced to make a very ambiguous submission in 1668. With this, however, the pacific Clement IX declared himself satisfied ; and the very secular French Ministers, who were frankly weary of the whole affair, persuaded the King to seize this opportunity of admitting the Jansenists generally to grace (1669).

Nor was an object-lesson wanting. For many years past the Crown lawyers had been extending the regale; though a few dioceses, mainly in the south of France, still claimed exemption on the ground of ancient usage. But in 1673 the Government thought the time had come for enforcing uniformity; and Louis formally declared the régale universally binding throughout the realm. Only two Bishops protested- Pavilion of Alet, and Caulet of Pamiers-both of whom had taken the Jansenist side in the matter of the formulary. The storm broke loose in 1675, when Louis presented to a canonry at Alet. Pavilion excommunicated the royal nominee; his metropolitan, the Archbishop of Narbonne, supported the Crown ; Pavilion appealed to the Pope. Very soon afterwards he died (1677), leaving Caulet to carry on the struggle alone. Caulet, whose temporalities were by this time confiscated, made a series of appeals to Innocent XI, a high-minded but very undecided pontiff; and at last persuaded him to interfere (December, 1679). In 1680 Caulet died, but his Cathedral Chapter more than replaced him. The metropolitan tried to interfere ; Innocent declared his action intrusive, and threatened him with excommunication (January, 1681).

(3) The Gallican Liberties are sacred. (4) The right of judging matters of doctrine belongs to Pope and Bishops jointly. On the other hand, the Articles steer clear of the extremer forms of Gallicanism. The chief share in judging questions of doctrine is reserved to the Pope ; and the Declaration carefully leaves room for Bossuet's personal opinion-already expressed in his opening sermon-that the See of Rome, though not infallible, is "indefectible": not necessarily right at any particular moment, it cannot fall permanently into error.

These concessions did not satisfy the Pope ; peace with Rome was only made in 1691. But Bossuet's statesmanship won him enormous credit at home ; for the next twenty years he was the dominant figure in the Church. A moderate and reasonable orthodoxy became the order of the day. As Ultramontanism receded into the background, independent spirits of the type of Gui Patin began to gravitate back to the Church. Even Cartesianism yielded for the moment to the spell of Malebranche, and arrayed itself in the dress of a rationalistic and very much etherealised Catholicism. To the world at large, however, Bossuet was the great reconciler of faith and reason-on the lines sketched out in his Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même, and his Discours sur rhistoire universelle. Both these books were written between 1670 and 1680, while their author was tutor to the Dauphin. Their great aim is to prove by reason that men ought to submit to authority. Philosophy- argued the Traité-shows that a God exists ; and that He governs and controls the affairs of men. History-continues the Discours-teaches that His governance is mainly indirect ; it is exercised by certain venerable corporations, ecclesiastical and civil, acting as His lawful representatives. Thereby the Discours rejoins the Politique tirée de rEcriture Sainte, the third member of the trilogy.

Wherever they were weak, however, the Government had long gone consistently on the plan of giving them less than their due, with small regard to the Edict of Nantes. Hence its Revocation, of which an account has been given earlier in this volume, appeared to the clergy as simply the last term in a logical series. Concerning the dragonnades that followed, opinion was divided. Some divines, of whom Bossuet was one, honestly did their best for the sufferers. Others agreed with the cynical saying of Madame de Maintenon, that there might be some hypocrisy among the adults, but the children, at any rate, would be gained to the Church. Others, again, were chiefly concerned to protect the sacraments from the kind of profanation alluded to by Saint-Simon, when he says that twenty-four hours were often enough to bring a neophyte from torture to abjuration, and from abjuration to communion.

Revocation by no means interrupted Bossuefs appeal to other methods of persuasion. In 1688 he brought out his Histoire des Variations des Églises Protestantes, in which he sought to prove that variation is necessarily a sign of error. Soon after he began to correspond with Leibniz, with a view to the reconciliation of the German Lutherans with the Roman Church. But negotiations broke down on this point of variation. Individual Catholic doctrines, such as purgatory or the Mass, Leibniz thought that his countrymen might accept ; but he refused to guarantee that they would believe to-morrow what they believed to-day. "We prefer,1' he said, "to belong to a Church eternally variable, and for ever moving forwards."

Bossuet might burst forth into refutations, and urge Fénelon to do the like; the philosopher courteously replied that to be answered by such pens did him too much honour.

But the worst rebel of all was Fénelon himself (1651-1715). The author of Télémaque had early made a great name for himself as a Director of Conscience, and as tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, eldest son of the Dauphin. But in contemporary eyes he was not so much a theologian as a "master of eloquence," or what would nowadays be called an accomplished man of letters; in the background, also, were large projects of political reform. These multitudinous interests gave him a far wider outlook than Bossuet, though his grasp of realities was not so sure ; and intellectual curiosity more than once led him into dangerous paths. About 1689 he became much impressed by the ideas of Madame Guyon (1648-1717), a lady of good family, considerable abilities, and great charm of manner, but the very hysterical representative in France of the religious revival known as Quietism. This was an outgrowth of the Spanish mysticism of St Teresa; though it was first popularised in Italy by the Spanish priest, Michael de Molinos (1640-97). In his hands it became a violent means of escape from the petty ceremonialism of Italian religion. Molinos was always bidding the soul rise beyond sacraments and attributes and dogmas, beyond the Trinity and the Incarnation, to " a view, wholly obscure and indistinct and general, of the Divine Essence as it was." The one means of approach to this Deity was the ancient via negationis. All hope and fear, all thought and action, all life and feeling, must be laid aside ; the soul must enwrap itself in the " soft and savoury sleep of nothingness, wherein it receives in silence, and enjoys it knows not what."

Such an attitude of mind might easily lead to Antinomianism ; but Fénelon thought that a change of language would be enough to guard against the danger, while keeping all that was good in Quietism. Molinos had spoken as though mere thinking of ourselves was the great evil ; Fénelon's enemy is self-interest. In his Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints (1697) he argues that, as men grow in holiness, they become indifferent to themselves. Not only do they not value religion for its consolations, but they cease to take an incidental pleasure in its exercise. Their whole soul is taken up in loving God, and they neither know nor care whether God loves them in return. Bossuet attacked this principle as inconsistent with Christianity, and for the next two years a bitter conflict raged between the two prelates, which did no great credit to either. Meanwhile, however, Fénelon had appealed to Eome. Early in 1699 Innocent XII gave judgment condemning the Maxims, although in very moderate terms. Fénelon at once submitted, and thereafter took small part in Church affairs, except to wage a vigorous war against the Janseni&ts.

Round his Réflexions was now spun a web of complicated intrigues. As Louis XIV grew older and more devout, there began a fight for his soul between the Jesuit confessor, Father La Chaise (1624-1709), and Madame de Maintenon, an ardent disciple of the moderate school of Bossuet. In 1695 she secured the archbishopric of Paris for her friend, Noailles, Bishop of Chalons, a pious and well-meaning aristocrat, but woefully tactless and undecided. He was suspected, also, of a tenderness for Jansenism ; he had certainly given official approval to Quesnel's Reflexions at Chalons, and this approbation he renewed in Paris (1699). Accordingly the Reßexions became the chief target of Ultramontane attack-so much so, as almost to supplant the Augustïnus itself. While the work of denunciation was proceeding, a much more dangerous issue was unexpectedly raised. In 1701 an indiscreet Jansenist consulted the Sorbonne as to whether it was not enough to receive the condemnation of the Augustinus in "respectful silence"-that is, with the purely external deference which good citizens might show to a law that they privately believed unwise. This casual question stirred the fires of fifty years before, and soon ecclesiastical France was in a blaze. In 1703 Louis wrote to Clement XI, suggesting that they should take concerted action to put an end to Jansenism for ever. In 1705 the Pope replied with a Bull condemning " respectful silence " outright.

Father Tellier (1643-1719), a Jesuit of blood and iron, who has been immortalised by Saint-Simon in one of the most repulsive portraits in literature. Almost immediately he persuaded the King to expel the few remaining nuns from Port-Royal, the Holy Place of Jansenism. In 1711 their cemetery was violated, and their convent buildings pulled down.

After Port-Royal came the turn of Quesnel. In the winter of 1711 Louis proposed to the Pope to condemn the Reßexions in the most solemn possible form. In 1713 appeared the Bull Unigenitus, a censure not only of all that Jansenism said, but of all that it had tried to say. Even Fénelon, although a warm admirer of the Bull, admits that popular opinion credited it with having condemned St Augustine, St Paul, and even Jesus Christ. It went altogether beyond the technical questions raised by Jansenism-notably when it dealt a heavy blow against the practice of Bible-reading lately sprung up among French Catholics, under the auspices of Bossuet quite as much as of Port-Royal. Hence the appearance of the Bull was the signal of a popular outcry; e\en some fifteen Bishops supported Noailles in refusing to accept it. The next two years were spent by the Court in a feverish endeavour to force it down their throats ; Noailles was only saved from deposition by the death of Louis in 1715.

On the accession of the Regent Orleans bigotry at once gave place to cynical indifference. Orleans was a freethinker, and all he cared for was to keep the clergy quiet ; hence he always sided with the stronger party, in the hope of crushing out the weaker. As the Bull was generally unpopular, he began by taking the part of its opponents ; Tellier was got rid of, and Noailles became chief ecclesiastical adviser to the Court. But the Regent very soon found that he had underrated the strength of the Pope and the Ultramontanes; besides, his two chief Ministers-Dubois (1656-1723) and Fleury (1653-1743)-were ecclesiastics, and wanted a Cardinal's hat. The Regent accordingly swung round to the side of the Bull. Nothing daunted by this, its four most resolute opponents among the Bishops published an appeal from the Pope to a General Council (1717). After some wavering Noailles supported them; but in 1720 Dubois patched up a truce between him and the Pope. This really satisfied neither party, though it obtained for Dubois a red hat. But in 1723 both he and the Regent died, leaving Fleury to carry on their policy.

Genuine Jansenism only survived among the handful of " Quesnellisls," and even they had fallen on evil days. Persecution can generally be trusted to induce hysteria in its victims, all the more so when they already accept a strong doctrine of conversion. Belief in one kind of miracle easily leads to belief in another ; and even the great days of Port-Royal could furnish a long list of special providences, miracles, and signs. As Jansenism shrunk more and more to the proportions of a harassed sect, these were multiplied a hundredfold. About 1728 the "miracles of St Médard " became the talk of Paris. These were a series of astonishing cures, mostly of nervous diseases, effected at the tomb of the Deacon Paris, a cleric of singularly holy life, and a perfervid opponent of the Unigenitus. On mere miracles followed " speaking with tongues,1' and the rise of the " Convulsionaries." These worked themselves up, mainly by means of self-torture, into a state of frenzy, in which they prophesied and cured diseases. They were, however, soon disowned by the more serious Jansenists.

Banished from France, these had taken refuge in Holland, where the Catholic minority was in close sympathy with Jansenism. In 1702 it had broken loose from Rome, and was now organising itself into an independent " Old Roman Catholic " Church. But the old spirit of Port-Royal still lingered in many a convent and country parsonage in France, and led throughout the eighteenth century to chronic conflicts with authority. Often the causes of quarrel were trumpery enough, and Jansen's latter-day descendants by no means always showed themselves reasonable or broad-minded. Still, in their dim fashion they upheld the great principle of their school-that religion begins and ends as an inward " touch of the Spirit." And over the movements of that Spirit no Church has jurisdiction.