Port Royal

PORT ROYAL is the old name of a little valley about twenty miles to the west of Paris.¹ As early as 1204 it was made over to pious uses by a crusading baron, lord of the estate, or by his wife, and was long occupied by a convent of nuns, of the order of St. Bernard. The religious house thus founded has linked the name of the little valley with a remarkable movement of thought in the Roman church, as well as with one of the most interesting chapters of monastic life to be found in all Christian history.²

In the year 1599, there was inducted as novice among the nuns of Port Royal a child eight years old, grave and precocious, second daughter of a celebrated advocate named Arnauld, and grandchild of an equally celebrated advocate, Marion. In the view of both father and grandfather, this was simply a convenient way of providing for one of a family of children, which in course of years increased to twenty. To secure for the child the succession to the convent rule, they did not even scruple, a little later, to state her age at least six years more than it was ; and, further, to disguise her name by giving, instead, that which she had taken as a sister in the little community. This pious fraud had its effect, not only on the king’s goodnature, but also upon the grave dignitaries of the church. At the age of eleven the child Jaqueline Arnauld, famous in religious history as La Mère Angélique, became abbess, invested with full authority over the twelve or fifteen young women who then constituted the religious house. Until her death in 1661, at the age of seventy, the story of Port Royal is almost the personal biography of her who was, during all that time, its heart and soul.

For the first few years we may well suppose that it was something like playing at the austerities of convent life. Very quaint and pretty pictures have come down, to illustrate this period. A morning call of that gay and gallant king, Henry IV., who, knowing that her father was visiting there, came, curious to see the pious flock under their child shepherdess; the little maid herself, in full ecclesiastical costume, and mounted on high pattens to disguise her youth, at the head of her procession to meet her royal visitor at the gate; the kiss he threw over the garden-wall, next day, as he passed by on a hunt, with his compliments to Madame la petite Abbesse, — these are bright and innocent episodes in the stormy story of the time.

But a great and sudden change occurred, a few years later. The young abbess, now nearly eighteen years of age, became converted to the most serious and rigid view of the duties of her calling. Gently and kindly, but without an instant’s wavering of purpose, inflexible to all temptation and entreaty, she resolved to restore the primitive austerity of the rule of the pious founder, St. Bernard. For one thing, this rule demanded that the time of morning prayer should be carried back to two o’clock from the self-indulgent hour of four ; and, for another, that all little personal treasures and belongings should be given up for that perfect religious poverty which is the ideal of monastic life. In this, the example of the girl abbess, cheerful and resolute in choosing the hardest task always for herself, easily won the day. The crisis of the reform was when, with passionate grief, with tears and swooning, she steadily refused admittance to her own father and brother, hardening herself against their entreaties, anger, and reproach, and would see them only at the little grating that separated the life within from the life without.

The true history of Port Royal dates from this crisis, Wicket Day, September 25, 1609. Just one hundred years and a few days later, early in October, 1709, the malice of the Jesuit party, which for more than half that time had shown a strangely persistent and malignant hostility, had its way. The grounds were laid waste. The sacred buildings were destroyed. Even the graves were dug open and the bodies that had been tenderly laid in them were cast out to be torn by dogs. All was done which insult and wanton desecration could do, to show that the heroic and eventful life of Port Royal was no more.

So far, it is simply the fortunes of one religious house, perhaps no more famous than many others, and not greatly different from them in the sort of story it has to tell. In this view, it is chiefly notable for being, as it were, a family history, connected at every point with the character and fortunes of a single household. Not less than twenty of the family of Arnauld — Angélique herself, her brothers and sisters, and children of a brother and sister — belonged to it, whether as simple nun, as official head, as lay brother, champion, director, or adviser. Of these, the most eminent in the lists of theology was the great Arnauld,” youngest child of the twenty: famous in controversy; indefatigably busy as a writer, scholar, logician, and polemic; staunch in persecution and in exile to the very close of his long life of eighty-two years (1612—1694). But there is hardly a day or an event in that story, for more than ninety of the hundred years, in which the most conspicuous name on the record is not that of a son or daughter of the family of Arnauld.

A very characteristic feature in the history is the single-hearted fidelity and unwavering courage of the female members of this religious community, which quite surpasses, at one and another crisis, that of their chosen champions and advisers. At least, these religious heroines would neither understand nor admit certain terms of compromise which theological subtilty found it easy to frame and accept. The point at issue was not so much one of opinion as of conscience and honor; and, to the amazement of friend and enemy, a score of these gentle and timid women went without hesitation into prison or poverty for what, in humility of spirit, they made not the least pretension to understand ; or, if they did waver, turned back with agonies of remorse to share the poverty or the prison of the rest. It came at length to be a mere question of fact whether five given propositions were contained in certain Latin folios they had never read and could not have understood ; but the Pope and the Jesuits had challenged the conscience of the little community, and to give way on one point was to be guilty of all.

This unique fidelity on so fine drawn a line of conscience has to do in part with the general discipline of Port Royal, and with simple loyalty to a religious house. But, in particular, it was created by the singular confidence and weight that were given in that discipline to the counsels of the spiritual director. The confessional had been developed to a system inconceivably vigilant and minute, touching every step of daily conduct. The skill trained under that system had become a science. It had its recognized adepts, masters, professors, as well known as those of any other art or mystery. No less than three,³ each of whom may be called a man of genius in this vocation, are identified with the history of Port Royal. That passive heroism which is the great glory of those humble confessors is a quality most certain to be bred and strengthened in the air of the confessional. It goes naturally with the tender piety and the vow of implicit obedience, which are the atmosphere of monastic life. One of the saints of the period, a man of great emotional piety, of fertile and poetic fancy, charitable and tender-hearted to those who might be gained to the faith, and of pitiless rigor to those who would not,⁴ — St. Francis de Sales, — had set that mark deep upon the mind of Angélique Arnauld, and through her it became a quality of the house. Nothing in the religious life, as we see it under such a discipline, is so foreign to our notions as the abject submission of a strong and superior mind to one inferior perhaps in every other quality except the genius and the tact of moral guidance. But nothing is so near the heart of that wonderful power held and exercised by the Roman priesthood.⁵

A special circumstance brought this religious community more conspicuously to the front, in the history of the time, than its humble locality might promise. As the fame of its discipline spread, the numbers grew. The narrow cells were crowded, and the unwholesome damps bred fever. Sickness and death the pious recluses were content to accept for their appointed discipline. But good sense prevailed, and an estate in the edge of Paris was bought, built on, and occupied. The most critical events in the story, accordingly, have their place not in the rude valley, but in the tumultuous capital. There are two Port Royals, one “in Paris,” one “in the Fields ; ” and the scene keeps shifting from one location to the other.

Then, too, it was Paris of the Regency and of the Fronde, where some of the most critical years were passed. This brought the religious house upon the scene of sharp conflicts, in church and state, and so exposed it to dangers which in time grew threatening. Some of the famous women of the day, who had been pets of society, or had been deep in political intrigue, found shelter and comfort among the nuns of Port Royal, — notably the famous and too charming Madame de Longueville, sister of the great Condé ; drawn, perhaps, by ties of old friendship, or reminiscence of early pious longings, or that recoil of feeling deepening to remorse when a course of vanity and ambition has been run through. Such guests might easily bring upon the most devout of monastic retreats a perilous suspicion of disloyalty to the court.

These are the points of interest we find in the annals of Port Royal simply as a monastic institution, or a group of persons bound by a general sympathy in religious views. These alone make it a unique chapter of religious biography. But these alone are not what make its real importance in Christian history. The hundred years covered by the life of this community are the chronological frame which incloses a very remarkable phase in the development of modern Romanism. The obstinate religious controversy on the doctrine of grace, brought so sharply to the front in the conflicts of the Reformation ; the long and bitter warfare of Jesuit and Jansenist; the vivacious and eager debate on the ground and form taken in the intricate science of casuistry ; the acrimonious discussion as to the exact meaning and import of papal infallibility, — these, no less than the heroic and indomitable temper exhibited by a group of pious recluses in defense of what was to them a point of conscience as well as a point of faith, are what give the story its significance to us.

Port Royal was the centre and soul of what is known as the Jansenist controversy. Jansenism was the last great revolt in protest against official domination, within the lines of the Roman church; and it was effectually suppressed. The story of its suppression is the most striking illustration we find anywhere of that unyielding hardihood in the assertion of authority which that church has deliberately adopted for its policy ; of that unrelenting centralism, which does not stick at any inhumanity or any sacrifice, to secure the servile perfection of ecclesiastical discipline. The best intelligence and the truest conscience of the time were clearly on the side of the Jansenist protest; but such reasons weighed not one grain against the hard determination of Pope, Jesuit, and king to crush in the most devout and loyal subjects of the church the meekest and humblest assertion of mental liberty.

For the origin of this controversy we must go back a little way, to the earlier polemics of the Reformation. The doctrine of divine decrees had come to be not only a main point in the creed of Calvin, but a test of fidelity in the Protestant faith. Its strong point, morally, was in setting a direct and explicit command of God to the conscience over against the arbitrary and minute directions of the church, which were sure to run out into a quibbling casuistry. Its weak point was that it declared, or seemed to declare, a downright religious fatalism. The church, on the other hand, in demanding obedience to its rule, must allow something for the liberty of the subject to obey or disobey ; while the doctrine of moral freedom, known as Pelagian, or even the semiPelagian compromise of it, had always been stigmatized as heresy. Here was a fair and open field for never-ending controversy.

A topic so inviting to scholastic subtilty and polemic ardor could not be neglected by the Jesuits. They became eager champions of free will. Their skill in the confessional had made them masters of the art of casuistry. The whole drift of their method was to make religion a matter of sentiment and blind obedience, rather than of conscience and interior conviction. They must at the same time repudiate the Pelagian heresy, in terms at least; and it was a party triumph when the Spaniard Molina, an eminent doctor of their order, published, in 1588, a treatise to reconcile the sovereignty and foreknowledge of God with the moral liberty of man. The key-word of his argument we shall express accurately enough by the phrase contingent decrees. Our acts themselves are not, in fact, predetermined, though the divine foreknowledge of them is infallible. This fine point was seized as a real key to the position. The name “ Molinist ” is used to define a system of thinking which holds that “ the grace of God, which giveth salvation,” is not sufficient of itself, but requires, to make it efficient, the coöperation of the human will. And this may be understood to be the position of the Jesuits in the debate that followed.

But an uneasy sense was left, in many pious minds, that this was not the genuine doctrine of the church. In particular, two young students of theology at Louvain were drawn, about the year 1604, into deep discussion of the point at issue. These were Saint-Cyran, afterwards confessor of Port Royal, and Cornelius Jansen, a native of Holland. They were well agreed that the point must be met by the study of St. Augustine ; and the one task of their lives, particularly of Jansen’s till his death in 1638, was little else than the exploring and the expounding of this single authority. Jansen is said to have studied all the writings of St. Augustine through ten times, and all those pertaining to the Pelagian controversy thirty times.

The strict Augustinian doctrine of the divine decrees thus became the firm conviction of these two friends, and through them the profession of Port Royal. It differs barely by a hair’s-breadth — if indeed any difference can be found — from the Calvinistic dogma. Jansenism is accordingly often called Calvinism, or Protestantism, within the church of Rome. Professing to be the most loyal and sincere of Catholics, the Port Royalists denied that charge. The distinction they made was this :⁶ The fatalistic doctrine, or Calvinism, asserts that there is no such thing as moral liberty at all. The Pelagian doctrine, or Molinism, holds that man’s natural freedom suffices to take the first essential step to his own salvation. The true Augustinian doctrine is that man’s freedom is (so to speak) dormant and impotent, till it has been evoked by divine “ prevenient ” grace; then, and not till then, it is competent to act. In short, in the most literal sense, “ it is God that worketh in us, both to will and to do.” ⁷

The controversy broke out upon the publication, in 1640, of the heavy folios in which Jansen had summed up the labor of his life ; and these folios were searched with jealous eyes, till five propositions were found in them, or were said to be found in them, on which a charge of heresy could be laid. Only two are important enough, or clear enough of technicality, to occupy us here. They are these: (1) that there are duties required of man, which he is naturally unable to perform ; (2) that Christ died not for all mankind, but only for the elect.

In the course of the debate, these “ five propositions ” became very famous. Whether they did or did not exist in Jansen’s folios was the point on which, as we have seen, the faithful women of Port Royal staked their loyalty, and underwent their martyrdom. The Pope’s bull condemning the volumes asserted that the heresies were there. As good Catholics, the Port Royalists condemned the propositions, but, as loyal members of the community, declared that they were not there. The Pope, they said, was doubtless infallible on a point of faith, but not on a point of fact. To this it was replied that religious faith was demanded for the one ; only ecclesiastical or human faith for the other.

On such poor quibbles as these all that long story of persecution turns. It was, to be sure, the proverbial rancor of theological hate that made the attack so bitter. But what rendered it effectual and deadly was that a Jesuit confessor held the conscience (such as it was) of the young king ; and that vague dread of disloyalty, with memories of the time when he and his mother were barred out of Paris by the Fronde, made the point a test not only of religious but of political soundness in the faith.

It would be a weary and needless task to trace the changes of fortune that befell the little community during those fifty evil years. Our concern is only with the movement of thought in which those fortunes were involved. A group of very cultivated, able, and devoted men had gathered in close relations with the religious house. They included brothers, nephews, friends, of the women who had assumed its vows, as well as their clerical advisers. They had founded a famous school at Port Royal in the Fields, and made the estate beautiful and productive by the labor of their hands. We find among them, as pupils or associates, several of the eminent men of letters, including Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, who reflected back upon the religious community something of the lustre of that famous and brilliant age.

Bright on the list is the illustrious name of Blaise Pascal, certainly the most vigorous and original genius of the day. At twelve, he was feeling his own way, in his play hours, in the forbidden field of mathematics, — forbidden, because his father wished first to make him master his Latin and Greek; and, when detected, he was trying to prove to himself, what he seems to have divined already, that the three angles of a triangle make just two right angles. At eighteen, to save his father labor in accounts, he devised, and with infinite pains — making with his own hands something like fifty models — constructed, a calculating machine, which was held a miracle of ingenuity, as if he had put mind into brass wheels and steel rods, and actually taught machinery to think.⁸ At twenty-four he was in advance of all the natural philosophers of the day, including Descartes, then in the height of his fame, in devising the true test of Torricelli’s theory of the weight of the atmosphere, in the famous experiment of the Puy-de-Dôme, a high hill in his native Auvergne: the mercury, which had stood at something over twenty-six (French) inches at the foot of the hill, showed less than twenty-four inches at its summit. Later in life, he relieved the distresses of an agonizing disease by working out the true theory of the cycloid, and challenging the mathematicians of the day to a solution of its problems.

These feats of a singularly sagacious and penetrating intellect interest us, as showing the high-water mark of the science of the day ; but still more, in this particular connection, as a contrast or relief to the share which Pascal had in the religious life of Port Royal, and to the unique place he holds as a religious thinker.

He was by nature seriously inclined. His health broke down early under the strain of study and discipline, and for more than half his life he was a nervous dyspeptic and a paralytic. “ From his eighteenth year to the hour of his death, he never passed a day without pain.” At one time he had partly recovered under a change of habit, and seems even to have enjoyed the gay life of Paris, with a touch of extravagance. For he chanced, one day, to be driving a carriage with six horses, when the leaders plunged over an unrailed bridge into the river Seine, and only the breaking of the traces saved him from being drowned. He appears never to have recovered from the shock of this accident; and the tradition afterward current was that he always saw a bottomless pit close at his left hand, and could not sit easy in his seat unless a chair or screen were set beside him.

The impression went deep and strong, naturally enough, in the way of a profound piety and contrition. A younger sister was already one of the religious community of Port Royal. He himself, at twenty-four, in a time of religious revival, came under the powerful influence of the confessor Saint-Cyran. At thirtyone, in the autumn of 1654, after experiencing all the intensity of that spiritual crisis which is termed “ conversion,” he devoted his life, with absolute power of conviction, to the tasks and disciplines of piety. This rare mind, prematurely great and prematurely lost — for Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, worn out with cruel austerities⁹ and long disease — is the radiant centre in that circle of genius, of profound and devout thought, which makes the intellectual glory of Port Royal.

The story of this religious crisis would not be quite complete without some mention of the famous “ miracle of the holy thorn,” which took place in the spring of 1656. A fragment of the crown of thorns had come into the possession of a pious enthusiast, who was not content till he had passed it about through several religious houses, to receive their veneration as an inestimable relic. A little niece of Pascal, pupil at Port Royal, was suffering with a “lachrymal fistula,” which seemed incurable ; but when touched by the holy thorn, it presently discharged, and “ the child was healed in the self-same hour.” Pascal had no doubt that the miracle was real. The mocking sarcasms of the enemies of the house only made belief in it more fixed and dear. It was the beginning of what grew into a long series of extravagances and scandals, which disfigure the later history of Jansenism, down to its dregs in the story of the convulsionnaires. Put now the faith was natural, genuine, and sincere; and it marks the starting-point of that remarkable volume of fragments which we know as Pascal’s Thoughts.¹⁰

A full descriptive title of Pascal’s Thoughts would be, Hints and Fragments of an Essay in Defense of the Christian Religion. Some of the hints are expanded into chapters, or brief essays; and some of the fragments consist of broken phrases, or even single words, written almost illegibly as loose memoranda, and faithfully preserved as they were left by the writer at his death. In the earlier editions, some of the keener points were trimmed away, so as not to disturb the “ religious peace” by thorning the Jesuit sensibilities ; many of the fragments were omitted, and the whole was made over into an artificial order. Even this smooth manipulation, however, did not disguise the vivacity, the emphasis, the shrewdness and point of these famous paragraphs, which have kept, in the line of theology, a repute something like that of the contemporary Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. With equal vigor, they often have almost equal acridity and sharpness. This quality comes from what might almost be called the keynote of the essay, — an incessant brooding on the paradoxes of human nature. Whole pages may be described as an expansion of those vigorous lines in Young’s Night Thoughts : —

Pascal puts this paradox in the figure of a self-conscious and sentient reed, — a figure which, after repeated revision, he has brought at length into this shape : —

“ Man is but a reed, the frailest thing in nature, — but a reed that thinks. To crush him it does not need the weapons of all the universe : a breath, a drop of water, is enough. But though the universe should crush him, yet man would still be nobler than his destroyer; for he knows that he is mortal, while the universe knows nothing of its own dominion over him.” (Chapter ii. 10.)

Another aspect of the paradox is given, pungently enough, in this statement of Pascal’s political faith : —

“ Summum jus summa injuria. The rule [voie] of the majority is best, because it is visible, and has strength to make itself obeyed ; still, it is the rule of the incompetent. If it could have been, force would have been put into the hands of justice. But, since force will not let itself be handled as one would, because it is a material quality, while justice is a mental quality, which is directed as one wills, justice has been committed to the hands of force ; and so we call that just which we must obey. Hence comes the right of the sword, — which is, indeed, a veritable right; for without it violence would be on one side and justice on the other.” (Chapter vii. 8.)

One other example of this epigrammatic turn : —

“ Who would fully know the nothingness of man has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a trifle (je-ne-sais-quoi) ; the effects are frightful. That trifle, so slight a thing that you cannot trace it, stirs up all the earth, — princes, armies, the world itself. If Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter, all the face of the earth would have changed.” (Chapter viii. 29.)

That there is something cynic and saturnine in this contemptuous wit there is no denying. But there is nothing in the character of the essay, taken broadly, to show Pascal as a skeptic in matters of faith, as is sometimes said, or to hint that his austerities were a sort of penance, to exorcise the spirit of unbelief. Not only are a very large part of the Thoughts a defense of Christianity on the familiar ground of the modern apologist, — the argument from history, prophecy, and miracle, — but in all this portion the tone has absolutely the calm and glad assurance of a pious believer. The very simplicity with which the argument is put, free from all suspicion of the flaws which a later time has found in it, is token of a faith which, in this direction at least, has not yet learned to question.

I think we should state the case more fairly thus. The mind of Pascal had been brought to feel with singular keenness the contrast between the two forms of assurance which we call knowledge and faith, — one reposing on outward evidence, the other on interior conviction. In geometry, he followed precisely, even as a child, the line of mathematical demonstration. In physics, he demanded and desired the most accurate processes of experiment to prove the theory which he already held as a truth of reason. It is a waymark of the advance we have made in Christian history that just here, in the keenest and most reflective intellect of the time, the contrast of those two methods, scientific and intuitive, had come sharply and clearly into consciousness. Pascal was in the very front rank of the scientific advance of his age, — an age of widening discovery and exact observation. But there is no reason to think that religious belief was not just as real and true to him as scientific. The whole method of the life he had adopted, the experiments in living which he saw constantly close about him, made that life as real, and the foundation it rested on as sure, as anything that could possibly be proved in the way of natural science.

In fact, Pascal seems to have held natural science very cheap. It was far, in that age, from having reached the point where it begins to furnish a serviceable law of life. Its widening fields of discovery served for little more than intellectual expansion and delight. To him the system of Copernicus and Galileo was simply a wider void, over against the intense reality he was conscious of in the world of emotion, belief, and hope. Nature, he said, confounds the skeptic; reason confounds the dogmatist.

Nay, it was not that contrast of the outward and inward world — so clear to us as we look back on the mental conditions of his day — which really impressed his mind. It was rather the moral contrast between methods alike purely intellectual. This he discusses with genuine interest under the names of Epictetus and Montaigne. The stoic method he admires, but condemns because it leads to pride. The skeptic or epicurean method he hates, because it leads to contempt. “ Epictetus is very harmful to those who are not persuaded of the corruption of all human virtue which is not of faith ; Montaigne is deadly to those who have any leaning to impiety and vice.” How far science is from giving him any light he shows in the following words : —

“ I had spent much time in the study of abstract sciences, and was weary of the solitude I found in it. When I began the study of man, I saw that these abstract sciences do not meet his case ; that I was more astray in exploring them than others were in ignorance of them, — and so I pardoned their little knowledge. But I thought at least to find many associates in the study of man, and that this is the proper study of mankind. I was deceived. There are still fewer who study that than geometry. It is because we do not know how to study this, that we search out other things. But the truth is that that [natural science] is not the knowledge which man needs, and, for his own welfare, he had best be ignorant of it.” (Chap. viii. 11.)

All this implies, to be sure, a certain skepticism as to the grounds of intellectual belief, and of its sufficiency for the real wants of human nature ; but it does not appear that Pascal ever wavered in the least as to the grounds of religious verity. In truth, was not that for which those humble devotees were so loyal to live and die at least as real a thing as that which Galileo saw afar off through a glass darkly ?

The fame of Pascal as a writer rests not on the Thoughts, which are broken and incomplete ; but on the Provincial Letters, which, for both style and argument, are reckoned among the most perfect of literary compositions. They are claimed, in fact, to have created, as it were, by one master stroke, that clear, graceful, piquant, and brilliant prose style which is the particular boast of the charming language in which he wrote.

These Letters give us, so to speak, the interior history of the conflict of Port Royal against the Jesuits. That is, without telling any of the incidents, they give the line of debate on morals and dogma which shows the course and the spirit of that controversy. To the charges of the Jesuits a labored reply had been made by Arnauld, which fell very flat and dead when he read it, by way of trial, to his colleagues. Pascal saw the point, and was persuaded to try his hand. And so came, at due intervals, this series of inimitable Letters Addressed to a Provincial, — probably the most perfect example of grave, sustained, and pungent irony in all literature.

Specimens would not exhibit their quality, as in the case of the Thoughts. The impression, like the expression of a face, must be caught, if not by studying, at least by glancing at, the whole. A large part is taken up with those details of casuistry which have given an evil odor to the very name of what is really nothing but a study of “ cases in morals,” — as if it meant apologies for what is immoral, — and have added the word “ Jesuitry ” to the world’s vocabulary of contempt. And these are given in the blandest of dialogue between the modest inquirer on one part, who represents the author, and the Jesuit father on the other, who brings out, with a droll complacency, all the ingenious apologies for usury, perjury, theft, and murder to be found in those famous casuists, Molina, Sanchez, and Escobar. Another large part is taken up with those fine-drawn distinctions of philosophic dogma which define the true faith between the Calvinist peril on the right hand and the Molinist on the left.

Now that the glow of controversy has gone out of these Letters, they in their turn have grown tame and dull. It is as impossible to recall the helpless and smarting wrath that chafed under the keen whiplash of moral satire as it is to revive the polemic interest of the debate on sufficient and efficient grace, or on the question — which Richelieu himself had turned aside to argue — whether attrition without contrition entitles the penitent to absolution. The interior conflicts of Roman Catholic theology two hundred years ago have small interest for us now.

But there is another aspect of the case, which has a very vital meaning to our history, take a view of it as surface broad as we will. The century which embraces the heroic and tragic story of Port Royal is also the century of splendor to the French monarchy ; of chief pride and strength to the Gallican church, which sunned itself in the rays of that glittering orb. When our story begins, Henry IV. was concerting an armed league of European powers, which should break the strength of Spain and compel a religious peace. The next year he was stabbed to death by a Jesuit assassin; and the way was opened that led into the horror of the Thirty Years’ War on one side the border, and on the other to the long tragedy of the extermination of Protestantism in France.

It was the age of the great court preachers. Bossuet and Bourdaloue died five years before, and Fénelon six years after, the final desolation of Port Royal. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes — which drove half a million Protestants into exile, hunted out by the terrors of search-warrant and dragonnade ; which carried misery and dread unspeakable among a whole population, pious, thriving, and pathetically loyal — took place during the height of Jesuit persecution and the exile of the great Arnauld. To make the tragedy more sombre, these horrors were approved, if not incited, not only by those great prelates, but by the exile Arnauld, who was the victim of their hostility. To enhance the irony of the situation, the same alliance of court and Jesuit which persecuted the women of Port Royal for not consenting to the Pope’s infallibility in matters of fact as well as in matters of faith had nearly made the church of France independent of the church of Rome. It was heresy not to sign the formulary in which Jansen’s five propositions were condemned by Alexander VII. ; it was disloyalty not to uphold the king in the four articles of the Declaration, which had been condemned and annulled by Alexander VIII. Nothing, in short, is wanting to proclaim the absolute divorce of ecclesiasticism from humanity or from faith.

To make this evidence of that divorce complete it needed only the tragic and pitiful story of the latter days of Port Royal. It is only at a distance, and very imperfectly at that, that we can know how the cruelty struck into those patient hearts. To be debarred for years from that “ frequent communion ” which was both the joy and the most sacred duty of their lives ; to have the sacraments withheld through suffering months of sickness, because they would not sign with the hand what was a lie to the heart ; to come to the hour of death, and still submit to the cold refusal of the words which to them were passwords and the comforting assurance of eternal blessedness, — all this was reality to them, in a sense we can hardly understand. It is quaintly touching to hear, too, how they flocked as doves to their windows near the convent wall, in midwinter nights, to listen to the voice of their confessor, as he preached to them, perched in a tree outside, — and that by stealth and as it were in flight, for fear of the Jesuit persecutor. Scenes of this sort prove to us, indeed, that the faith of that day was not dead. But they seem to show that when we would find it we must look for it quite outside that circle illuminated by the burning and shining lights of the official faith.

This judgment would not be quite true. We know that Boss net was an able, and in his way an estimable, champion of the church he believed in. We can read for ourselves the words of Bourdaloue, that come home genuine and straight to our own conscience. We know that Fénelon was an angel of charity in the diocese to which he had been exiled from the court. But we know, too, that the church which these men served had lost " that most excellent gift of charity ; ” and even while they served it, it was treasuring wrath against the coming day of wrath, which overtook it in the Revolution.

J. H. Allen.