m
1726 to 1743.

The most considerable subject of interest connected with his peaceful
administration, was the quarrel between the Jesuits and the
Jansenists. Fleury took the side of the former, although he was never
an active partisan; and he was induced to support the Jesuits for the
sake of securing the cardinal's hat--the highest honor, next to that
of the tiara, which could be conferred on an ecclesiastic. The Jesuits
upheld the crumbling power of the popes, and the popes rewarded the
advocates of that body of men, who were their ablest supporters.

The Jansenist controversy is too important to be passed over with a
mere allusion. It was the great event in the history of Catholic
Europe during the seventeenth century. It involved principles of great
theological, and even political interest.

[Sidenote: Cornelius Jansen.]

The Jansenist controversy grew out of the long-disputed questions
pertaining to grace and free will--questions which were agitated with
great spirit and acrimony in the seventeenth century as they had
previously been centuries before by Augustine and Pelagius. The
Jesuits had never agreed with the great oracle of the Western church
in his views on certain points, and it was their aim to show the
absolute freedom of the human will--that it had a self-determining
power, a perfect liberty to act or not to act. Molina, a Spanish
Jesuit, had been a great defender of this ancient Pelagianism, and his
views were opposed by the Dominicans, and the controversy was carried
into all the universities of Europe. The Council of Trent was too wise
to meddle with this difficult question; but angry theologians would
not let it rest, and it was discussed with peculiar fervor in the
Catholic University of Louvaine. Among the doctors who there
distinguished themselves in reviving the great contest of the fifth
and sixth centuries, were Cornelius Jansen of Holland, and Jean de
Verger of Gascony. Both these doctors hated the Jesuits, and lamented
the dangerous doctrines which they defended, and advocated the views
of Augustine and the Calvinists. Jansen became professor of divinity
in the university, and then Bishop of Ypres. After an uninterrupted
study of twenty years, he produced his celebrated book called
_Augustinus_, in which he set forth the servitude of the will, and the
necessity of divine grace to break the bondage, which, however, he
maintained, like Calvin, is imparted only to a few, and in pursuance