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The Encyclopædia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial bodies.
I had, however, some uneasiness which I must not pass over in silence. After having been afraid of the Jesuits, I begun to fear the Jansenists and philosophers. An enemy to party, faction and cabal, I never heard the least good of parties concerned in them.
Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a narrow brow. Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate.
This little body of the faithful was called the Little Church; and those within its fold, like the Jansenists, led the strictly ordered lives that appear to be a first necessity of existence in all proscribed and persecuted sects. Many Jansenist families had joined the Little Church.
It was for this that Lewis XIV. counted them worse than atheists. The Jesuits, it has been well said in keeping down their enemies by force, became the partisans of absolute government, and upheld it on every occasion. The Jansenists, after they had been crushed by violence, began to feel to what excesses power might be brought.
Saint-Simon, the court chronicler, mentions that the gardens were so immaculately kept that when the Archbishop and "La Belle" Duchesse de Lesdiguières used to promenade therein they were followed by a gardener who, with a rake, sought to remove the traces of each footprint as soon as made. Later, the Cardinal de Beaumont, the persecutor of the Jansenists, resided here.
He had been early befriended by Father la Chaise, and he was now especially trusted and esteemed by the successor of that Jesuit Le Tellier, Le Tellier, that rigid and bigoted servant of Loyola, the sovereign of the king himself, the destroyer of the Port Royal, and the mock and terror of the bedevilled and persecuted Jansenists.
So many fires smouldering in the hearts, so many different struggles going on in the souls, that sought to manifest their personal and independent life have often caused forgetfulness of the great mass of the faithful who were neither Jansenists nor Quietists.
THE SPANISH CLERGY—Their primitive state—Their subsequent organization—Barraganas—Immoral practices of the clergy—Their wealth, and its sources—Their territorial possessions—Their influence and incomes—Their opposition to the sciences—Their ultramontane principles—The “pass” of the Spanish sovereign necessary to the validity of the Pope’s bulls—Doctrine of the Jansenists favoured by the ministers of Charles III.—Port-Royal and San Isidro—Parish priests—Sources of their income—Many of them good men, but deficient in scriptural knowledge and teaching—Their preaching—Abolition of tithes by the minister, Mendizabal—Effects of that measure—Poverty and present state of the clergy—Their degraded character and unpopularity—Their timidity in recent times of tumult—Ecclesiastical writers of the Peninsula—Power of the Inquisition curtailed by Charles III.
And Arouet turned our conversation towards the ecclesiastical dissensions between Jesuits and Jansenists that then agitated the kingdom. "Those priests," said Bolingbroke, "remind me of the nurses of Jupiter: they make a great clamour in order to drown the voice of their God." "Bravissimo!" cried Hamilton. "Is it not a pity, Messieurs, that my Lord Bolingbroke was not a Frenchman?
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