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Updated: May 20, 2025
But the spirit that dictated them had in a measure died out during the corrupt reign of Louis XV. The long quarrel between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, which agitated the Galilean church during the latter part of the seventeenth and the earlier half of the eighteenth century, had tended neither to strengthen nor to purify that body.
They wanted, it is true, no talent or accomplishment into which men can be drilled by elaborate discipline; but such discipline, though it may bring out the powers of ordinary minds, has a tendency to suffocate, rather than to develop, original genius. It was universally acknowledged that, in the literary contest, the Jansenists were completely victorious.
The most probable explanation is that the authorities were eager to silence one at least of the three elements of opposition, the Jansenists, the lawyers, and the philosophers, who were then distracting the realm. The two former were beyond their direct reach. They threw themselves upon the foe who happened to be most accessible.
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?
Great men were found in either camp, and a struggle began between two powerful bodies. The Jansenists affected an excessive purity of morals and of doctrine, and accused the Jesuits of preaching a relaxed morality. The Jansenists, in fact, were Catholic Puritans, if two contradictory terms can be combined.
All the different kinds of liberty are connected; the Philosophers and the Protestants tend towards republicanism, as well as the Jansenists. The Philosophers strike at the root, the others lop the branches; and their efforts, without being concerted, will one day lay the tree low.
The teaching of the Jansenists sought, on the contrary, to inspire such awe of the Sacraments that neither priests nor people would dare to approach them save at very rare intervals. It was the great mass of the people poor, simple and suffering, those children of God whom Vincent loved and in whose service the whole of his life had been spent whose salvation was in danger.
He lived at the time when that Church was much agitated by the assumptions of Pope Clement XI., aided by the worthless Louis XIV., and by the resistance of the brave-hearted Jansenists to the famous Bull Unigenitus. For three years France was torn by these disputes.
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.
The first proposition of the Jansenists was, that there are divine precepts which good men, notwithstanding their desire to observe them, are nevertheless absolutely unable to obey: God not having given them such a measure of grace as is essentially necessary to render them capable of obedience. Mosheim's Eccles. Hist., ii. 397.
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