memory is venerated in many places at Rome"?[14] Of all the
troublesome race of panegyrists, the Roman variety is the most
ingenious and the least to be trusted.

When Bishop Burnet was travelling in Italy, in the year 1686, the
doctrines of the Spanish priest Molinos, the founder of the famous
sect of Quietists, had lately become the object of attack of the
Jesuits and of suspicion at the Papal Court. His system of mystical
divinity is still of interest from its connection with the lives of
Fénelon and Madame Guyon, if not from its intrinsic character. Like
most other mystical doctrines, his teachings seem to have been open to
the charge, that, while professedly based on the highest spirituality,
they had a direct tendency to encourage sensuality in its most
dangerous form. Molinos was at first much favored at Rome and by the
Pope himself; but at the time of Burnet's journey he was in the
custody of the Holy Office, while his books were undergoing the
examination which finally led to the formal condemnation of
sixty-eight propositions contained in them, to the renunciation of
these propositions by their author, and to his being sentenced to
perpetual imprisonment Burnet relates that it happened "in one week
that one man had been condemned to the galleys for somewhat he had
said, another had been hanged for somewhat he had writ, and Molinos
was clapt in prison, whose doctrine consisted chiefly in this, that
men ought to bring their minds to a state of inward quietness. The
Pasquinade upon all this was, "_Si parliamo, in galere; si scrivemmo,
impiccati; si stiamo in quiete, all' Sant Uffizio. Eh! che bisogna
fare?_" "If we speak, the galleys; if we write, the gallows; if we
stay quiet, the Inquisition. Eh! what must we do, then?"

With the changes of times and the succession of Popes, new material