I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire, how Equivocation triumphed throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it every where, both in things and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side, and before whom princesses are standing-or is she not? The equivocal is also near the throne in the person of the humble Père La Chaise, the real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Gallicans and the scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the pope, but would like to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by their distinguo and evasions. Indeed when I put in opposition to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Janus of the seventeenth, the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least, sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Every thing is softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint Bartholomew, you have the monitor of a religious revolution, called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantz, that cruel comedy of forced conversion; then, the

unheard-of tragedy, of a proscription organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern government!-Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery reign every where! Deceit in politics: local life destroyed without creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the chamber of poisons: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one guilty!*

-And can devotion be real with such morals?— If you reproach the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth appear to you cynical, and devoid of human respect, confess at least also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of the seventeenth. That great historian Molière, has painted the portrait of this century, and found its name Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted, since it is during this period the illustrious and predominant example of the success of the equivocal. The Jesuits who, in general, have invented little, did not make the discovery, but they perceived very plainly the profit they might derive from it. We have seen how they gradually made themselves masters of the convents of women, though

* All this will appear in a new light, as soon as we read the passages in the important publication relative to State Prisons, which Mr. Ravaisson, senior, of the Arsenal Library, is now preparing.

professing all the time to be strangers to them. The Visitation, especially, was under their influence.* The superior of Marie Alacoque, who had her confidence, and directed her connection with Jesus Christ, gave timely notice to Père La Chaise.

Things were coming to a crisis. The Jesuits sadly wanted some popular machine to set in motion, for the profit of their policy. It was the moment when they thought, at least they told the king so, that England, sold by Charles II., would, in a short time, be entirely converted. Intrigue, money, women, every thing was turned to account, to bring it about. To King Charles they gave mistresses, and to his brother, confessors. The Jesuits who, with all their tricks, are often chimerical, thought that by gaining over five or six lords, they would change all that protestant mass, which is protestant not only by belief, but also by interest, habit, and manner of living, protestant to the core, and with English tenacity.

See then these famous politicians, gliding as stealthily as wolves, and fancying they will carry every thing by surprise. An essential point for them was to place with James, the king's brother, a secret preacher, who, in his private chapel, might work silently, and try his hand at a few conversions. To act the part of a converter, they required a man

* So much so, that the Visitandines, the daughters of good St. François, became for the Jesuits the guardians and gaolers of the Port-Royal nuns at the time they were dispersed.

who was not only captivating, but especially ardent and

fanatical; such men were scarce. fications were deficient in the

The latter quali

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