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Updated: May 20, 2025
All of them in the distinct province of theology: to put down Arianism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism, Manichæism, Lutheranism, Jansenism. Such is the broad result of its action in the past; and now as to the securities which are given us that so it ever will act in time to come.
To the Jesuits nothing was left but to oppress the sect which they could not confute. Lewis the Fourteenth was now their chief support. His conscience had, from boyhood, been in their keeping; and he had learned from them to abhor Jansenism quite as much as he abhorred Protestantism, and very much more than he abhorred Atheism.
But the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of the natural goodness of man. Jansenism had struggled against it and was defeated. After theology it was the turn of metaphysics.
You racked your brains to discover the cause of this change. Mere loss of time! Flightiness was the sole reason of it. Devoutness was her strong point; by that she governed and held her place. She found a King who believed himself an apostle, because he had all his life persecuted Jansenism, or what was presented to him as such.
We find many traces of the state of mind which led her first into a mild form of devotion, serious but not too ascetic, and later into pronounced Jansenism.
For instance, remember Fareinism, which has been rife, since the eighteenth century, in Fareins, a village of the Doubs, where Jansenism took refuge when driven out of Paris after the closing of the cemetery of Saint Médard. There a priest, François Bonjour, reproduced the 'convulsionist' orgies which, under the Regency, desecrated the tomb of Deacon Paris.
Finally, the cause of Jansenism did not rise by the miracles, but sunk, although the miracles had the anterior persuasion of all the numerous adherents of that cause to set out with. These, let us remember, are the strongest examples which the history of ages supplies.
Voiture thanks her for her melons, and assures her that they are better than those of yesterday; Madame de Choisy hopes that her ridicule of Jansenism will not provoke Madame de Sablé to refuse her the receipt for salad; and La Rochefoucauld writes: “You cannot do me a greater charity than to permit the bearer of this letter to enter into the mysteries of your marmalade and your genuine preserves, and I humbly entreat you to do everything you can in his favor.
M. d'Orleans could not contain himself while he told the story, and never spoke of it without laughing until the tears came into his eyes. It ran all through the Court and all over the town, and the marvellous thing was, that the King was not angry at this. It was a testimony of his attachment to the good doctrine which withdrew him further and further from Jansenism.
Her sympathies and associations led her toward a mild form of Jansenism, and as the evening shadows darkened, her thoughts turned to fresh speculations upon the destiny of the soul. She went with Mme. de Coulanges to visit Mme. de La Sabliere, who was expiating the errors and follies of her life in austere penitence at the Incurables.
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