Sacred Heart were
formed in France.

I cannot help pausing a moment, to admire how Equivocation triumphed
throughout this age.

On whatever side I turn my eyes, I find it everywhere, both in things
and persons. It sits upon the throne in the person of Madame de
Maintenon. Is this person a queen who is seated by the king's side,
and before whom princesses are standing--or is she not? The equivocal
is also near the throne in the person of the humble Pere la Chaise, the
real king of the clergy of France, who from a garret at Versailles
distributes the benefices. And do our loyal Galileans and the
scrupulous Jansenists abstain from the equivocal? Obedient, yet
rebellious, preparing war though kneeling, they kiss the foot of the
pope, while wishing to tie his hands; they spoil the best reasons by
their _distinguo_ and evasions. Indeed, when I put in opposition to
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries this Janus of the seventeenth,
the two others appear to me as honest centuries, or, at the very least,
sincere in good and in evil. But what falsehood and ugliness is
concealed under the majestic harmony of the seventeenth! Everything is
softened and shaded in the form, but the bottom is often the worse for
it. Instead of the local inquisitions, you have the police of the
Jesuits, armed with the king's authority. In place of a Saint
Bartholomew, you have the long, the immense religious revolution,
called the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that cruel comedy of
forced conversion; then the unheard-of tragedy of a proscription
organised by all the bureaucratical and military means of a modern
government!--Bossuet sings the triumph; and deceit, lying, and misery
reign everywhere! Deceit in politics; local life destroyed without
creating any central life. Deceit in morals: this polished court, this
world of polite people receives an unexpected lesson from the _chamber
of poisons_: the king suppresses the trial, fearing to find every one
guilty!--And can devotion be real with such morals?--If you reproach
the sixteenth century with its violent fanaticism, if the eighteenth
appear to you cynical and devoid of human respect, confess at least
also that lying, deceit, and hypocrisy are the predominant features of
the seventeenth. That great historian Moliere has painted the portrait
of this century, and found its name--Tartuffe.

I return to the Sacred Heart, which, in truth, I have not quitted,
since it is during th