what had been once put forth, and the Pope sent repeated orders to accept the condemnation of Quesnel's book; but the Cardinal de Noailles, a good many Bishops, and the Parliament, kept up a steady resistance, and an appeal was even made to a General Council by four Bishops and the Theological College of the Sorbonne. Unfortunately Noailles hesitated to take so decisive a step, and Philippe of Orleans, only wishing to hold the balance and prevent a disturbance, silenced the appeal, and disgraced those who made it, and soon after a decree of the Inquisition condemned it.

The dispute went on hotly, till Dubois suggested a declaration which virtually accepted the bull, but appended to it an explanation which made it more tolerable to the Jansenists. Both the Parliament and

Archbishop struggled against it, but finally accepted it in 1720, so that there was a sort of truce. It lasted, however, only a few years, till Dubois, the Regent Orleans, and Pope Clement XI., were all dead. Benedict XIII. was Pope, and Bishop Fleury at the head of French affairs.

Cardinal de Noailles had great hopes of the new Pope, and drew up twelve articles of faith, chiefly respecting the action of grace, which were shown to Benedict, and of which he entirely approved; but the clergy of the other faction were by this time fighting for victory rather than for truth, and they threatened the Pope with a schism until he gave way, and notified to de Noailles that he insisted on the unqualified acceptance of the Bull Unigenitus.

Bishop Fleury had hitherto been a moderate man, but he wanted to be a Cardinal like Richelieu, Mazarin, and Dubois. The rank it gave him was useful politically, and he was, unless general belief does him injustice, content to purchase it by undertaking to enforce submission to the Bull Unigenitus.

Bishop Soazen was an old man who had been a pupil of Quesnel, and was a noted preacher. He had ruled for many years over the diocese of Senez, a thinly-peopled part of Provence, and was much revered. He had never accepted the Bull Unigenitus, and had been one of the four prelates who had signed the appeal to a General Council. He was past eighty when, in 1726, he published a Pastoral Instruction to his clergy, in which he reviewed all the controversy, expressed his strong adhesion to the twelve articles of Cardinal de Noailles, and exhorted his brethren to be faithful at all costs to the truth.

The Archbishop of Embrun, the province, was a disgraceful character named Pierre de Tencin, a comrade of Dubois, whose transactions in the Rue Quincampoix had been fraudulent, and who was accused of simony and perjury, yet Fleury did not scruple to make him an instrument for crushing the venerable Soazen, and winning favour at Rome, while Tencin himself hoped to obtain the Cardinal's hat by this persecution. So a provincial council was called, at which among others Belzunce of Marseilles was unfortunately present, and they suspended the good old man from all episcopal and ecclesiastical

CAMEO XXXI.

Acceptance of Bull Unigenitus. 1720.

CAMEO XXXI.

Death of Archbishop de Noailles. 1728.

functions till he should revoke his Pastoral Instruction. Moreover, a lettre de cachet banished him to the Abbey of Chaise Dieu, in the bleak Auvergnat mountains, where in constancy and patience he lived to his ninety-sixth year.

The lawyers of Paris, fifty in number, declared the sentence of the Council illegal, and Cardinal de Noailles protested, but of course the Pope confirmed the sentence, with high commendation of the prudence and zeal of its framers. The Parliament of Paris and de Noailles refused to register this brief from Rome, but this was the last effort of the Archbishop of Paris. He was an old man, and his mind was weakened, his spirits gave way, and in a state of morbid depression he allowed his nephew and niece to induce him to retract his protest and all his acts against the Bull.

Poor old man, he had had some presentiment that advantage would be taken of his failing powers, and had given two priests among his friends a paper declaring that whatever might be gained from him contrary to the sentiments of his life was not to be accepted.

Disputes went on round him even till his death, at seventy-eight, on the 4th of May, 1729. A little more resolution would have made him a brave champion of the National Church, but he never recovered his remorse for the overthrow of Port Royal.

Government made use of the submission thus obtained to gain an entire victory over the party. By lettre de cachet they turned out all the forty-eight doctors of the Sorbonne who had signed the appeal, and the remainder of course reversed it, and agreed to admit no one into their body who did not accept the Bull Unigenitus in an unqualified

manner.

The new Archbishop of Paris, Gaspard de Vintimille, was a thoroughgoing Ultramontane, and under the boy-king and the mild old Cardinal, the most outrageous acts of arbitrary power were perpetrated upon the Church. All ecclesiastics were ordered to sign their adhesion to the bull on pain of losing their benefices, and when the Parliament of Paris refused to register the Edict, its consent was assumed and proclaimed. On this it put forth a protest, which greatly encouraged the clergy who resisted, though the Council of State cancelled it.

Three parish priests in the diocese of Orleans refused to sign, and were deprived by their Bishop. They appealed to Parliament, which declared their sentence illegal. The Bishop appealed to the Crown, the lawyers of Paris took up the cause of the curés, Fleury came down upon them, suspended the priests, and informed the advocates that unless they withdrew their defence of the clergy they would never be allowed to practise again in their profession, whereupon they apologised.

The national Church spirit, however, died hard—the like commands from other Bishops and their sentences were again declared illegal by the Parliament, and the parliamentary resistance quashed by the Crown

with sharp censure. On this three hundred advocates retired to their chambers, and all the courts of law stood still, and this time

they were victorious. Fleury had to retract his censure and apologise.

And there was another struggle over the canonisation of St. Hildebrand, i.e. Gregory VII., whose holiday and services the staunch Gallicans objected to as an innovation, but really because he might be viewed as the author of Papal aggressions. Fleury found that he must not go too far, and did not again interfere with the national spirit. Jansenism might have at its root the germ of a dangerous doctrine respecting Predestination; but the struggle had long been not whether the doctrine itself were right or wrong, but whether it existed in the writings of Jansen himself, and in those of Quesnel, and this was affirmed on the sole authority of the Papal See by those who had never read the books themselves; while in point of fact this same condemnation had been extracted with the utmost difficulty from an unwilling Pope by the threats of Louis XIV. Jansenism had brought in a higher and purer standard, and controverted and exposed the means by which the Jesuits procured outward unity and communion by toleration of moral evil. This brought upon them the enmity, not only of those who were theologians enough to understand the error, but of those who held blind submission to Rome an absolute duty, and of all such as hated strictness.

The men of saintly life who were untainted with either Jansenism or Ultramontanism were dying out. Gallicanism and Jansenism were getting identified, and indeed so were Jansenism and strict purity of life, at least in the popular mind. There can be no doubt that the absolute arbitrary and unjust crushing of all freedom of religious thought, even when it did not lead to schism, crippled resistance to the perilous atheistical philosophy, and rendered the political revolution that was preparing infinitely more universal and perilous. Some of the Jansenists in this depressed state fell into a state of enthusiasm, which produced so-called miracles. A devout man in deacon's orders, François de Paris, died in 1731, and was buried in the cemetery of St. Medard. A young girl in a consumption was believed to have recovered at his tomb, and many more followed, generally nervous hysterical cases, whom excitement threw into convulsions, ending in recovery. Even an Abbé, lame from his birth, reciting a neuvaine at the grave, fell into these convulsions, and was declared to be less lame, and his example had such an effect that he was called the Master of the Convulsionnaires. The Jansenist Bishops at first hoped that this was an interposition in their favour, and the Government did not at first interfere, but the conduct of the pilgrims and convulsionnaires became so wild and scandalous that their own friends gave them up, and the cemetery of St. Medard was closed by the police, though these strange aberrations lasted some time longer, and a priest named Vaillant believed himself Elijah, and had a following, until he was thrown into

CAMEO

XXXI.

Persecution of

Jansenists.

1730.

CAMEO XXXI.

Persecution of Huguenots.

1724.

the Bastile, where he spent twenty-two years. Not a century before he

would have been burnt.

Like the Jansenists, the Huguenots enjoyed an interval of rest during the Regency, and were recovering their discipline under Antoine Court, a pastor born in 1696, of a peasant family, whose vision from his infancy had been to build up again what was termed "the Church under the Cross." In 1715, a Synod was held in the deserts of the Cevennes, there was a sending of ministers to Switzerland for Presbyterian ordination, and a revival of devotion and spirit of organisation began to renew the strength of the Reformed.

Their renewal of observances could not but become known, and there were a few local prosecutions, but nothing serious as long as the Regent lived. Both he and Dubois refused to authorise the edict for a fresh persecution, which the Duke's almoner, Lavergne de Tressan, Bishop of Nantes, demanded, in the hope that his zeal against Protestantism might win him the Cardinalate. But as soon as the Duke of Bourbon and Fleury were in power Tressan obtained his edict, and immediately hastened to take counsel with the terrible old foe of the Huguenots, De Baville, who was very aged, but who exerted himself to draw up an instruction for dealing with the Huguenots, and is said to have died with the pen in his hand to sign it.

The edict renewed those of Louis XIV. Preachers were condemned to death, their accomplices to the galleys, if women, to have their hair shaven off, and to be for ever imprisoned. Parents who did not bring their children to the priests within twenty-four hours for baptism were heavily fined, likewise for not sending them for instruction. Exhorting the sick was liable to a penalty of the galleys, and the sick who refused the Sacraments were banished if they recovered, if they died were to be dragged on a hurdle to an unhonoured grave. Marriages by a pastor were no marriages by the law, and the children could not inherit !

The clergy were for the most part unwilling to act on these cruel commands, and they were not always carried out. Some of the Huguenots fled, especially to Sweden, and in the Cevennes there was again a resort to the caverns and rocks of the wilderness. A college for the ministers had been established at Lausanne, and thence came a supply of pastors, ready to be martyred. Paul Rabaut was the most noted of these, and for full forty years dared constant danger, sleeping in dens and forests, hunted everywhere, and knowing of the death of many and many a comrade, yet undaunted in faith and noted for devotion and eloquence.

The men, when captured, worked in the docks, chained together, the women were sent off to the tower of Constance, near Aigues-Mortes, for life-long imprisonment, utterly ignorant of the lot of their husbands and children. Such was the condition of the Huguenots through this entire reign, though the persecution chiefly depended on the will of individual Bishops and Governors, and was not always actively enforced.

It is not easy to say what was meant by philosophy as understood in the eighteenth century. Love of wisdom is simple enough as a definition, and the philosophy of the ancient Greek was without doubt what St. Paul described as the endeavour to find out God "if haply they might feel after Him," like a blind man groping in the dark. Later, philosophy came to mean all researches into the causes and constitution of things Divine and human, the foundation of morality, the endeavour to find out hidden things, whether of the human mind or of Nature; and when the eighteenth century came in, it had begun to signify reasoning upon ethics and morals in general, on systems not necessarily founded on religion. Thus while resignation to vexations, because "it will be all the same a hundred years hence," has been jocosely called "philosophy," and the inquiry into the constitution and laws by which stars and planets, animals and plants are governed is more correctly termed philosophy, the term came to mean in general, reasoning on the eternal principles of justice and morality, apart from what is disclosed to us by revelation.

دو

66

The more theology became narrowed in popular teaching, as by Calvinism on the one hand and Jesuitism on the other, the more the "commandments of men were taught as doctrines," " and obedience to them tyrannically enforced; and the more superstition was encouraged, so much the more were speculative minds inclined to recur to those first principles of right, and to throw over their connection with the Divine will. It was not always so, some were eminently Christian philosophers, but there were others who left religion entirely out of their systems. However, as they in general considered their views as esoteric, and compliance with the observances of the country, the government,

CAMEO XXXII.

Philosophy