proved by the cruel penances and vigils under which his macerated
frame sank into an early grave. His spirit was the spirit of
Saint Bernard: but the delicacy of his wit, the purity, the
energy, the simplicity of his rhetoric, had never been equalled,
except by the great masters of Attic eloquence. All Europe read
and admired, laughed and wept. The Jesuits attempted to reply:
but their feeble answers were received by the public with shouts
of mockery. 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. To the
Jesuits nothing was left but to oppress the sect which they could
not confute. Lewis the Fourteenth was now their chief support.
His conscience had, from boyhood, been in their keeping; and he
had learned from them to abhor Jansenism quite as much as he
abhorred Protestantism, and very much more than he abhorred
Atheism. Innocent the Eleventh, on the other hand, leaned to the
Jansenist opinions. The consequence was, that the Society found
itself in a situation never contemplated by its founder. The
Jesuits were estranged from the Supreme Pontiff; and they were
closely allied with a prince who proclaimed himself the champion
of the Gallican liberties and the enemy of Ultramontane
pretensions. Thus the Order became in England an instrument of
the designs of Lewis, and laboured, with a success which the
Roman Catholics afterwards long and bitterly deplored, to widen
the breach between the King and the Parliament, to thwart the
Nuncio, to undermine the power of the Lord Treasurer, and to
support the most desperate schemes of Tyrconnel.