d practice,
increased their party at the risk of the strangest auxiliaries.
Whoever declared himself an enemy of the Jansenists became their
friend. Hence arose the immoral inconsistency of the Society--its
perfect indifference to systems. These people, who for more than half
a century had been fighting for free will, formed a sudden alliance,
without any intervening period of transition, with the mystics who
confounded all their liberty in God. Just before they had been
reproached with following the principles of pagan philosophers and
jurisconsults, who attribute everything to justice and nothing to grace
or love; now they receive quietism at its birth with open arms, and the
preacher of love, the visionary Desmarets de St. Sorlin.

Desmarets had, it is true, done them some essential service. He had
succeeded in dismembering Port-Royal, by gaining over some of the nuns.
He assisted them powerfully in destroying poor Morin, another visionary
more original and more innocent, who fancied himself to be the Holy
Ghost. He tells us himself how, being encouraged by Father Canard
(Annat) the king's confessor, he gained the confidence of this
unfortunate man, made him believe he was his disciple, and drew from
him written documents, by means of which he caused him to be burnt
(1663).

The protection of this all-powerful confessor gained for the most
extravagant books of Desmarets the approbation of the Archbishop of
Paris. He declared in them that he was a prophet, and undertook to
raise for the king and the pope an army of a hundred and forty-four
thousand _devots_, as knights of papal infallibility, to exterminate,
in concert with Spain, the Turks and the Jansenists.

These _devots_, or victims of love, were self-sacrificed people, who
affected a sort of inward annihilation, and who lived henceforth only
in God. Hence they could do no harm. The soul, said this prophet,
having become a nonentity, cannot consent; so that whatever it may do,
inasmuch as it has not consented, it has not sinned. It no longer
thinks at all, either of what it has done, or of what it has not done;
for it has done nothing at all. God being all in us, does all, and
suffers all; the devil can no longer find the creature, either in
itself or in its acts, for it acts no longer. By an entire dissolution
of ourselves, the virtue of the Holy Ghost flows into us, and we become
wholly God, by a miraculous _deiformity_. If there be still anythin