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Updated: May 20, 2025
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.
Thus, during the continuance of the crisis in France, ultra-montane catholicism was represented by the nonjuring clergy; Jansenism by the constitutionist clergy; philosophical deism by the worship of the Supreme Being, instituted by the committee of public safety; and the materialism of Holbach's school by the worship of Reason and of Nature, decreed by the commune.
I repeat to you what Arnauld said to his friend Nicole, when the latter, tired of the struggle for Jansenism, declared to him that he would retire and repose: 'Vous reposer!
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.
Over the high altar of her chapel she writes SOLI DEO HONOR ET GLORIA. "It is the way to make no one jealous," she remarks. She was rather inclined toward Jansenism, but she could not fathom all the subtleties of her friends the Port Royalists, and begged them to "have the kindness, out of pity for her, to thicken their religion a little as it evaporated in so much reasoning."
In fine, perceiving in the rumors of the day nothing more than art and dissimulation on their part, and thinking they, in their state of security, had time to watch over all their interests, I had had not the least doubt of their shortly crushing Jansenism, the parliament and the Encyclopedists, with every other association which should not submit to their yoke; and that if they ever suffered my work to appear, this would not happen until it should be so transformed as to favor their pretensions, and thus make use of my name the better to deceive my readers.
"Look at Amiens, again, with its colourless windows and crude daylight, its chapels enclosed behind tall railings, its silence rarely broken by prayer, its solitude. There too is emptiness; and why I know not, but to me the place exhales a stale odour of Jansenism.
Cyran, but more true and more simple in its practical application, offered strong minds the satisfaction of direct and personal relations between God and man; it saw the way to satisfy them without crushing them; and that is why the kingly power in France succeeded in stifling Jansenism without having ever been able to destroy the Protestant faith.
Cyran, the head and founder of Jansenism, abandoned the human soul unreservedly to the supreme will of God; his faith soared triumphant over flesh and blood, and his disciples, disdaining the joys and the ties of earth, lived only for eternity.
Nor was the Jansenist controversy merely a discussion of grace and free will. The principles of Jansenism, when carried out, tended to secure independence to the national church, and to free the consciences of men from the horrible power of their spiritual confessors. Jansenism was a timid protest against spiritual tyranny, a mild kind of Puritanism, which found sympathy with many people in France. The Parliament of Paris caught the spirit of freedom, and protected the Jansenists and those who sympathized with them. It so happened that a certain bishop published a charge to his clergy which was strongly imbued with the independent doctrines of the Jansenists. He was tried and condemned by a provincial council, and banished by the government. The Parliament of Paris, as the guardian of the law, took up the quarrel, and Cardinal Fleury was obliged to resort to a Bed of Justice in order to secure the registry of a decree. A Bed of Justice was the personal appearance of the sovereign in the supreme judicial tribunal of the nation, and his command to the members of it to obey his injunctions was the last resort of absolute power. The parliament, of course, obeyed, but protested the next day, and drew up resolutions which declared the temporal power to be independent of the spiritual. It then proceeded to Meudon, one of the royal palaces, to lay its remonstrance before the king; and Louis
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