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If one wanted to make them abjure Christianity and follow the Koran, there would be nothing required but to show them the dragoons; provided that they assemble by night, and withstand all instruction, they consider that they have done enough." Cardinal Noailles was of the same mind as Bossuet and FEnelon.
Our thoughts may well linger over those three great minds, Pascal, Bossuet, and Fenelon, one layman and two bishops; all equally absorbed by the great problems of human life and immortality. With different degrees of greatness and fruitfulness, they all serve the same cause.
Some time after the death of Bossuet, the renewed resistance which was being made in France against Papal usurpations gave rise to action on the part of the primate of our Church, which in the sixteenth century might have been cordially followed up in England, but in the eighteenth was very generally misunderstood and misrepresented.
Let me say to you here: when a man in the silence of the night, meditates upon the causes of enticement for woman, when he finds them in her education and, putting aside personal observation, for the sake of expressing his thoughts, matures them at the sources I have indicated, not allowing himself to use his pen except from inspiration of Bossuet and Massillon, permit me to ask you if there is a word to express my surprise, my grief, on seeing this man dragged into Court on account of some passages in his book, and precisely for the truest and most elevated ideas that he was able to bring together!
"I would suggest that your Majesty should ask this man his name, his business, and why it was that the dragoons were quartered upon him." "You hear the reverend father's question." "My name, sire, is Catinat, by trade I am a merchant in cloth, and I am treated in this fashion because I am of the Reformed Church." "I thought as much!" cried the confessor. "That alters matters," said Bossuet.
The bell of honour rang for twenty minutes every time I paid a visit to these ladies; and I only had incense at high mass, and at the Magnificat, in my quality of foundress. I went from time to time to make retreats, or, to be more accurate, vacations, in my House of Saint Joseph. M. Bossuet solicited the favour of being allowed to preach there on the day of the solemn consecration.
Compared to them, I saw in Montesquieu only erudite, ingenious, and systematical dissertations; Fénelon seemed to me divine, but chimerical; Rousseau, more impassioned than inspired, greater by instinct than by truth; while Bossuet, with his golden eloquence and fawning soul, united, in his conduct and his language before Louis XIV., doctoral despotism with the complaisance of a courtier.
Bossuet was convinced that the question of Providence was the most serious and pressing among all the questions of the day that were at issue between orthodox and heretical thinkers. Brunetiere, his fervent admirer, has named him the theologian of Providence, and has shown that in all his writings this doctrine is a leading note.
A very strong reason and of potent logic, naturally imprinted upon an upright spirit and a sensible mind, irresistibly convinced, both of them, that justice alone can govern the world. La Bruyere had just been admitted into the French Academy, in 1693. In his admission speech he spoke in praise of the living, Bossuet, Fenelon, Racine, La Fontaine; it was not as yet the practice.
They represent meaning, therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible weight of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be observed with the English word 'awful. Some nations constitutionally tend to understate, others to overstate.
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