ruction of the Dauphin.

Political eloquence could not exist where power was grasped by the
hands of one great ruler. Judicial eloquence lacked the breadth and
elevation which come with political freedom; it contented itself with
subtleties of argument, decked with artificial flowers of style. The
pulpit was the school of oratory. St. Vincent de Paul had preached
with unction and a grave simplicity, and Bossuet, his disciple, felt
his influence. But the offering which Bossuet laid upon the altar
must needs be costly, an offering of all his powers. While an
unalterable good sense regulates all he wrote, the sweep of his
intellect demanded plenitude of expression; his imagination, if it
dealt with life and death, must needs deal with them at times in the
way of magnificence, which was natural to it; and his lyrical
enthusiasm, fed by the prophetic poetry of the Old Testament, could
not but find an escape in words. He sought no literary fame; his
sermons were acts of faith, acts of duty. Out of the vast mass of
his discourses he printed one, a sermon of public importance--that
on the unity of the Church.

At the request of friends, some of the Funeral Orations were published.
These, with his address on the profession of Louise de La Valliere,
were all that could be read of Bossuet's pulpit oratory by his
contemporaries. His sermons were carefully meditated and prepared,
but he would not check his power of lofty improvisation by following
the words of a manuscript. After his death his papers had perilous
adventures. By the devotion of his first editor, Deforis, nearly two
hundred sermons were after many years recovered; later students have
presented them with as close an approximation as is possible to their
original form. Bossuet's first manner--that of the years at Metz--is
sometimes marred by scholastic subtleties, a pomp of quotations, too
curious imagery, and a temper rather aggressive than conciliating.
During the period when he preached in Paris he was master of all his
powers, which move with freedom and at the same time with a majestic
order; his grandeur grows out of simplicity. As Bishop of Meaux he
exhorted his flock out of the abundance of his heart, often without
the intermediary of written preparation.

He is primarily a doctor of the faith: dogma first, determined by
authority, and commending itself to human reason; morality, not
independent, but proceeding from or connected with dogma, and while
truly h