it ended in
marrying England to Holland--a marriage nearly fatal to France.

And what was their religious work among us in the old days of Louis
XIV.? What was the last use made of the omnipotent sway of the La
Chaises and the Telliers? We well know: the destruction of Port-Royal,
a military expedition to carry off fifteen old women, the dead dragged
from their graves, and sacrilege committed by the hands of authority.
This authority expiring in the terrible year 1709, which seemed to
carry off at one blow the king and the kingdom, was employed by them,
in all haste, to destroy their enemies.

Port-Royal came to an end in 1709, Quietism had finished in 1698, and
Gallicanism itself, the great religion of the throne, had been placed
at the feet of the pope by the king in 1693. Behold Bossuet laid in
the tomb by the side of Fenelon, and the latter next to Arnaud. The
conquerors and the conquered repose in a common nullity.

The emblem prevailing, and being substituted for every system, people
felt less and less the need of analysing, explaining, and thinking; and
they were glad of it. The explanation the most favourable to authority
is still a giving of accounts, that is to say, a homage paid to the
liberty of the mind. But in the shadow of an obscure emblem one may
henceforth without shaping any theory, or allowing any advantage to be
taken, apply indifferently the practice of all the various theories
that had been abandoned, and follow them alternately or conjointly,
according to the interest of the day.

Wise policy, excellent wisdom, with which they cover their nothingness!
Having dispensed with reasoning for others, they lose the faculty of
reasoning altogether, and, in the hour of danger, they find themselves
disarmed. This is what happened to them in the eighteenth century.
The terribly learned contest that then took place found them mute.
Voltaire let fly a hundred thousand arrows against them, without
awakening them. Rousseau pressed and crushed them without getting one
word out of them.

Who then could answer? Theology was no longer known to the
theologians. The persecutors of the Jansenists mingle in their books
published in the name of Marie Alacoque, both Jansenist and Molinist
opinions, and without being aware of it. They composed in 1708 the
manual which has since become the basis of instruction adopted in our
seminaries; and this manual contains the entirely new doctrine, that on
every Pap