Romans shall
excel in other arts. "Remember, Jesuit, thy art is calumny."

[1] Chateaubriand, Vie de Rance, pp. 227-229.

[2] See Heliot; and, for Paris especially, Felibien.

[3] OEuvres, vol. xi. p. 120 (ed. 3318.)

[4] Tabaraud, Life of Berulle, vol. i. passim.

CHAPTER V.

REACTION OF MORALITY.--ARNAUD, 1643.--PASCAL, 1657.--BASENESS OF THE
JESUITS.--HOW THEY GET HOLD OF THE KING AND THE POPE, AND IMPOSE
SILENCE UPON THEIR ENEMIES.--DISCOURAGEMENT OF THE JESUITS.--THEIR
CORRUPTION.--THEY PROTECT THE FIRST QUIETISTS.--IMMORALITY OF
QUIETISM.--DESMARETS DE SAINT SORLIN.--MORIN BURNT, 1663.

Morality was weakened, but not quite extinct. Though undermined by the
casuists, Jesuitism, and by the intrigues of the clergy, it was saved
by the laity. The age presents us this contrast. The priests, even
the best of them, the Cardinal de Berulle for instance, rush into the
world, and into politics; while illustrious persons among the laity,
such as Descartes and Poussin, retire to seek solitude. The
philosophers turn monks, and the saints become men of business.

Each set of people will acquire what it desires in this century. One
party will have power; they will succeed in obtaining the banishment of
the Protestants, the proscription of the Jansenists, and the submission
of the Galileans to the pope. Others will have science; Descartes and
Galileo give the movements; Leibnitz and Newton furnish the harmony.
That is to say, the Church will triumph in temporal affairs, and the
laity will obtain the spiritual power.

From the desert where our great lay-monks then took refuge a purer
breeze begins to blow. We feel that a new age now commences, modern
age, the age of work, following that of disputes. No more dreams, no
more school-divinity. We must now begin to work in earnest, early and
before daylight. It is rather cold, but no matter; it is the
refreshing coolness of the dawn, as after those beautiful nights in the
North, where a young queen of twenty goes to visit Descartes, at four
in the morning, to learn the application of algebra to geometry.

This serious and exalted spirit, which revived philosophy and modified
literature, had necessarily some influence on theology. It found a
resting point, though a very minute and still imperceptible one, in the
assembly of the friends of Port-Royal; it added grandeur to their
austerity, morality asserted its own claims, and religion awoke to a
sense