who was not only captivating, but especially ardent and fanatical; such men were scarce. The latter qualifications were deficient in the young man whom Père la Chaise had in view. This was a Father la Colombière, who taught rhetoric in their college at Lyons: he was an agreeable preacher *, an elegant writer, much esteemed by Patru, mild, docile, and a good sort of man. The only thing that was wanting was a little madness. To inoculate him with this, they introduced him to Mademoiselle Alacoque: he was sent to Paray-lemonial, where she resided, as confessor extraordinary of the Visitandines (1675). He was in his thirty-fourth year, and she in her twenty-eighth. Having been well prepared by her superior, she immediately saw in him the great servant of God, whom her visions had revealed to her, and the very same day she perceived in the ardent heart of Jesus her own heart united to the Jesuits.

La Colombière, being of a mild and feeble nature, was hurried away unresistingly into this ardent vortex of passion and fanaticism. He was kept for a year and a half in this spiritual furnace; he was then snatched away from Paray, and hurled red-hot into

* His sermons are weak. His Spiritual Retreats are more curious, being the young Jesuit's journal: the efforts he makes to be fanatical show how difficult fanaticism had become. His portrait, a very characteristic one, is at the head of the

sermons.

H

England. They were, however, still mistrustful of him, fearing he might cool, and sent him, from time to time, a few ardent and inspired lines: Marie Alacoque dictated, and the superior was her amanuensis.

He remained thus two years with the Duchess of York in London, so well concealed and shut up, that he did not even see the town. They brought to him a few lords, who thought it advantageous to be converted to the religion of the heir presumptive. England having at last discovered the papist conspiracy, La Colombière was accused, brought before parliament, and embarked for France, where he arrived ill; and though his superior sent him to Paray to see whether the nun could revive him, he died there of a fever.

However little inclined people are to believe that great results are brought about by trifling causes, they are obliged, however, to confess, that this miserable intrigue had an incalculable effect upon France and the world. They wanted to gain England, and they presented themselves to her, not in the persons of the Gallicans, whom she respected, but in those of the Jesuits, whom she had always abhorred. At the very moment when Catholicism ought, in prudence at least, to have discarded the idolatries with which the Protestants reproached it, they published a new one, and the most offensive of all, the carnal and sensual devotion of the Sacred Heart. To mingle horror with ridicule, it was in 1685, the sad and lamentable

year of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantz, that Marie Alacoque raised the first of those altars which overspread the whole of France. We know how England, confirmed in her Protestantism and horror of Rome by the Jesuits, took to herself a Dutch king, carried away Holland in her movement, and by this conjunction of the two maritime powers obtained the dominion of the seas.

The Jesuits may boast that they have been the means of setting Protestantism in England upon a very solid foundation. All the Father Mathews in the world will never be able to remove it.

Their political work, as we have seen, is important : it ended in marrying England to Holland—a marriage nearly fatal to France.

And what was their religious work among us, in the old days of Louis XIV.? What was the last use made of the omnipotent sway of the La Chaises and the Telliers? We well know: the destruction of Port-Royal, a military expedition to carry off fifteen old women, the dead dragged from their graves, and sacrilege committed by the hands of authority.* This authority expiring in the terrible year 1709, which seemed to carry off, at one blow, the king and the kingdom, was employed by them, in all haste, to destroy their enemies. †

* See the details in the Hist. Mem. on Port-Royal (1756), and in General History (1757).

†They pursue them with the same fury in our time, espe

Port-Royal came to an end in 1709, Quietism had finished in 1698, and Gallicanism itself, the great religion of the throne, had been placed at the feet of the pope by the king in 1693. Behold Bossuet laid in the tomb by the side of Fenelon, and the latter next to Arnaud. The conquerors and the conquered repose in a common nullity.

The emblem prevailing, and being substituted for every system, people felt less and less the need of analysing, explaining, and thinking; and they were glad of it. The explanation the most favourable to authority is still a giving of accounts, that is to say, a homage paid to the liberty of the mind. But in the shadow of an obscure emblem, one may, henceforth, without shaping any theory, or allowing any advantage to be taken, apply indifferently the practice of all the various theories that had been aban

cially the sisters whom they believe to be Jansenists. The Jansenists wish to suffer and die in silence: they do not want us to pity them. History cannot allow this martyr resignation; but will mention, as one of the most curious and unnoticed facts, the excellent review they publish in a few copies for themselves (Revue Ecclésiastique, Rue Saint-Séverin, No. 4.). In it they have replied, forcibly, but moderately, to the unbecoming declamations against Port-Royal, made by Father Ravignan in Saint-Séverin (1842), as well as to other ultramontane novelties preached by that Jesuit. Who would believe that, whilst persecuting and abusing the Jansenists, the Jesuit party has dared to claim (in the House of Peers) the names of the illustrious Jansenists; for instance, that of Rollin? Do they inherit from those they assassinate ?

doned, and follow them alternately or conjointly, according to the interest of the day.

Wise policy, excellent wisdom, with which they cover their nothingness! Having dispensed with reasoning for others, they lose the faculty of reasoning altogether, and, in the hour of danger, they find themselves disarmed. This is what happened to them in the eighteenth century. The terribly learned contest that then took place found them mute. Voltaire let fly a hundred thousand arrows against them, without awakening them. Rousseau pressed and crushed them, without getting one word out of them.

Who then could answer? Theology was no longer known to the theologians.* The persecutors of the Jansenists mingle in their books, published in the name of Marie Alacoque, both Jansenist and Molinist opinions, and without being aware of it. They composed, in 1708, the manual which has since become the basis of instruction adopted in our seminaries; and this manual contains the entirely new doctrine, that on every papal decision Jesus Christ inspires the pope to decide, and the bishops to obey: every thing is an oracle and a miracle in this clown

* It appears to be singularly so in our time. What a sight to see preached solemnly before the highest ecclesiastical authority some sermon or other, which, from first to last, is only a heresy! The adversaries of their theology are the only persons who remember it.

† Tabaraud, On the Sacred Hearts, p. 38.