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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 univefsal. 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).

Hence the so-called Peace of Clement IX is treated by Jansenist writers as a triumph: really, it was the beginning of their downfall. They had set out to reform the Church: they ended by having to fight hard for a doubtful foothold within it. And under the leadership of Arnauld scion of a family of lawyers- the party itself had gone downhill; a controversial argumentative impulse was shouldering out the spiritual. Everyone admired Arnauld's talents; for he was not only a party-leader, but a considerable geometer and metaphysician. But, in admiring, the world agreed with Bossuet, who said that Arnauld was inexcusable for having squandered his great abilities in an attempt to prove that Jansen had not been condemned. Besides, the Peace was

much too artificial an affair to be loyally observed-least of all at a time when Louis XIV was preparing to enforce a rigid uniformity throughout his dominions. The Catholics he had well in hand already; the Huguenots he was soon going to expel from France. Why, then, mercy to a handful of eccentric recluses, who believed themselves to be in special touch with Heaven, and therefore might at any moment set their conscience up against the law?

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Nor was an object-lesson wanting. For many years past the Crown lawyers had been extending the régale; 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 protestedPavillon 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. Pavillon excommunicated the royal nominee; his metropolitan, the Archbishop of Narbonne, supported the Crown; Pavillon 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). This invasion of the canonical rights of a metropolitan- for Innocent had prejudged the case, without listening to what the Archbishop might have to saywas bitterly resented in France as a gross invasion of the Gallican Liberties. After much consultation between the Court and the leading prelates, it was agreed to convoke a special Assembly of the Clergy-a body roughly answering to the Anglican Convocation - to deal with the whole question. The Assembly met in October, 1681; at its opening session Bossuet, just appointed Bishop of Meaux, preached a great sermon on the unity of the Church. The régale was soon settled by a compromise, carried through by Louis himself against the advice of his Ministers, and greatly to the advantage of the clergy. Colbert now suggested that this would be an excellent chance of setting at rest for ever the much-debated question as to the exact relation of the Gallican Church to the Papacy. Bossuet and other Bishops objected, on the ground that a declaration on this subject could do no good, and would give mortal offence at Rome. But Colbert persisted; and in March, 1682, the Assembly unanimously voted assent to four Articles drawn up by Bossuet. These are a skilful compromise. On the one hand, they assert the main points of Gallican belief. (1) The Pope has no jurisdiction over temporal sovereigns. (2) He is below a General Council.

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(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 l'histoire 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 l'Écriture Sainte, the third member of the trilogy.

But Bossuet's great object in life was the conversion of the Huguenots. In 1668 he had overcome the scruples of Turenne; two years later he published an Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique, so moderate in tone that his adversaries accused him of having fraudulently watered down the Roman doctrines to suit a Protestant taste. On the other hand, he never doubted the right of the State to enforce religious uniformity at the point of the sword; this, as he more than once boasted in his controversial writings, was one of the few points on which Catholic and Protestant doctors were agreed. Besides, the French Churchmen of the time were brought up to look on the Huguenots as a serious political danger: Saint-Simon only expresses the common belief, when he calls them "a sect which had become a State within the State, dependent on the King no more than it chose, always loud in complaints, and ready, on the slightest pretext, to embroil the whole kingdom by an appeal to arms." This passage represents what the Huguenots would have liked to do, rather than what they did; but in the few places where they were strong, they had undoubtedly encroached on their legal rights.

Reaction against Bossuet

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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 Bossuet's appeal to other methods of persuasion. In 1688 he brought out his Histoire des Variations des Eglises 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," he said, "to belong to a Church eternally variable, and for ever moving forwards."

Nor was it only in Germany that Bossuet taught the Protestants to glory in their variations. Jurieu, and other Huguenot controversialists, fully accepted the idea of progress; and they presently went on to ask whether Rome itself was quite so unchangeable as Bossuet supposed. Herein they were supported by the Oratorian scholar, Richard Simon. He accused St Augustine, Bossuet's own especial master, of having corrupted the primitive doctrine of Grace. Bossuet set to work on a Défense de la Tradition et des Saints Pères; but Simon only went on to raise issues graver still. Under a veil of polite circumlocutions, such as did not deceive the Bishop of Meaux, he claimed the right of interpreting the Bible like any other book. Bossuet denounced him again and again, and even set the police in motion; Simon answered that he could afford to wait until "the old fellow" was no more. Another Oratorian was more dangerous still. Malebranche prided himself on having brought numbers of Jansenists, Cartesians, and other misbelievers back within the Catholic pale; but his remedies appeared to Bossuet almost as bad as their disease. Simon had endangered the belief in miracles by bringing lay rules of evidence into play; but Malebranche abrogated miracles altogether. On his principle it was blasphemous to suppose that the Author of Nature would break through a reign of law He had Himself established in the

universe. 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 (164097). 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 Rome. 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 Jansenists.

For Jansenism was by no means dead, although the Government