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Simon (1638-1712), founder of Biblical criticism in France. As a nursery of clerical scholars, the Oratory had only one rival. This was the Congregation of St Maur (1627), an offshoot of the Benedictine Order. Under the guidance of Mabillon (1632–1707), it developed an invaluable school of critics and ecclesiastical historians.

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."

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.

Direction, however, was only for the few; for the many the one means of instruction was the sermon. Nowadays it is hard to realise how large a part the pulpit played in the life of seventeenth century France. Political assemblies were unknown. Journalism, still in its infancy, was closely muzzled. The pulpit was the only place where popular criticism of those in high places could safely make itself heard. Nor did preachers always resist the obvious temptation of airing their views on subjects in general, just to show off their own cleverness. La Bruyère declares that they made their pulpit a means of advancement as rapid, but not less hazardous, than the profession of arms. Others gave in to the dominant préciosité. Mascaron (1634–1703) and Fléchier (1632-1710), the two earliest of Louis XIV's Court-preachers,

could generally be trusted not to say things in a simple way, if it was possible to put them in an artificial. But the religious revival waged war on préciosité. St Vincent de Paul is said to have thrown himself at the feet of a flowery young orator, and begged him to give up ornaments so unworthy of a crucified Jesus. This spirit triumphed in Bossuet (1627-1704), greatest of all the preachers. Quite apart from their literary qualities, his sermons are distinguished by a fervour at once evangelical and practical. His aim was so to interweave doctrine and morality that each would lend assistance to the other. Faith would be the inspiration of all Christian practice; while practice, in its turn, would lead to a deeper grasp of faith. But, except on a few State occasions, Bossuet seldom mounted a Paris pulpit after he became tutor to the Dauphin (1670); and his mantle fell on the Jesuit Bourdaloue (1632-1704). In him, however, a moralistic, argumentative tone makes itself heard beside the evangelical; as Fénelon said, his sermons were magnificent reasonings about Christianity, but they were not religion. This criticism is still more true of Massillon (1663-1742), last of the great Court-preachers.

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.

Nor did these devotees of the practical take pains to distinguish between the ideal interests of religion and the terrestrial interests of the Church. It was God's vicegerent; and to appeal-as Pascal appealed- from its decisions to the judgment-seat of Christ was alike blasphemous and

foolish. Right-minded men trained themselves to believe that, whatever she did, the Church was always right. But a Church, ridden by the spectre of efficiency, is like to end in frank utilitarianism; and during the seventeenth century there was a continually-smouldering contest between the Jesuits and divines of a less worldly school as to exactly how far utility should be allowed to go. The great fight was over the confessional. Should priests pitch their standards high or low? The Jesuits argued that severity scared many away altogether-a contingency the more to be regretted in the case of the rich or influential. Accord ingly they began a campaign to force confessors to be lax. The famous doctrine of probabilism-first broached about the beginning of the seventeenth century — made it a grave sin in the priest to refuse absolution, if there were any good reason for giving it; even when there were other and better reasons for refusing it. And to determine what such "good reason" was fell to Escobar and the Casuists.

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.

These abuses called forth a series of protests from eminent divines, among whom Bossuet was the most conspicuous; and during the later years of the century probabilism disappeared altogether from the French divinity schools. But Bossuet only struck at isolated points; meanwhile a movement was springing up, which aspired to cut down at the root

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The origins of Jansenism

the whole Jesuit conception of religion. This was the revival known as Jansenism. It is so called from the name of its founder, Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), a Dutch divine, long professor of divinity at Louvain University, and afterwards Bishop of Ypres in Belgium. His doctrines are contained in a bulky treatise on the theology of St Augustine, posthumously published in 1640. Meanwhile, however, his ideas had been popularised in France by his friend Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581-1643), commendatory Abbot of Saint-Cyran. Both were men strongly gifted with the evangelical impulse; and both had early been brought into conflict with the Jesuits. Saint-Cyran, like many other French divines, sympathised warmly with the secular Catholic missionaries in England in their interminable quarrel with their Jesuit rivals. Jansen had early taken sides in the controversy that had raged at Louvain ever since the days of its celebrated professor, Michael Baius (1513-89), and the eminent Jesuit, Leonard Lessius (1554-1625). The great question at stake was the right way of teaching theology. The Jesuits partly stood for the strictly logical scholastic method; the followers of Baius were for an appeal to mysticism and subjective experience.

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.

Accordingly Augustine became their oracle; and for years a sullen controversy raged as to whether Jansen had really understood his master. With the mass of his followers, however, these questions of scholarship were an altogether secondary matter; they valued his teaching because he gave them neither ceremonial nor theology, but genuine religion. For the great work of Jansenism was to insist that piety does not mean believing a particular opinion, or adopting a particular mode of life; it means conversion, becoming a new creature. Morality, church-going, orthodox opinions, might be excellent things in their place; but through them no man ever saved his soul. His fate in the next world depended on whether his life in this had been informed by the love of God. And by love of God Jansen meant simply the religious sense. This might be weak, or it might be strong; but even its humblest forms were enough to distinguish him who had it from those who had it not to draw all his actions into a new perspective, and put a different colouring

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The meaning of Jansenism

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his thoughts. But inasmuch as a radical change of character is beyond man's power to effect, Grace must descend upon him like a whirlwind as once it descended on Jansen's two spiritual heroes, St Augustine and St Paul-and draw his will "irresistibly, unfailingly, victoriously," out of darkness into light.

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."

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Thus the ultimate religious sanction became subjective- an inward "witness of the Spirit"; and herein the French authorities saw endless possibilities of insubordination both in Church and State. For in the French seventeenth century a theological opinion was a political event. A disaffected party in the Church was sure to develop some kind of organised machinery for the furtherance of its views; and on this machinery all disaffected parties in the State threw a wistful eye. The Frondeurs, in particular, would have given much for Jansenist support. But the Fronde was still to come, when Jansenism gave its first great manifesto to the world. One of Saint-Cyran's most important converts was Angélique Arnauld (1591-1661), Abbess of Port-Royal, a convent near Versailles, and thenceforward the head-quarters of the party. She converted her brother Antoine (1612-94), a young Doctor of the Sorbonne. In 1643 Antoine Arnauld published a book on Frequent Communion, an attack on the confessors who gave absolution easily, without enquiry into the penitent's character, or the sincerity of his repentance. The book raised a violent storm, but many divines supported Arnauld, and no official action was taken against his party till 1649. Then the Sorbonne condemned five propositions from Jansen's