n art which can bring into relief what the work of art requires.
Why the children of the infallible Church rose up in disobedience
against their mother is left unexplained. The great heresy, Bossuet
was persuaded, had almost reached its term; the intellectual chaos
would soon be restored to universal order under the successors of
Innocent XI.

In the embittered controversy with his brother-Bishop of Cambrai,
on the significance of which the singular autobiography of Madame
Guyon[1] throws much light, Bossuet remained the victor. It was a
contention between dogmatic rectitude and the temper of emotional
religion. Bossuet was at first unversed in the writings of the
Catholic mystics. Being himself a fully-formed will, watchful and
armed for obedience and command--the "man under authority"--he
rightly divined the dangers to dogmatic faith arising from
self-abandonment to God within the heart. The elaborate structure
of orthodoxy seemed to dissolve in the ardour of a personal emotion;
it seemed to him another form of the individualism which he condemned.
The Church was a great objective reality; it had laid down a system
of belief. A love of God which ignored the method of God, was but
a spurious love, leading to destruction.

[Footnote 1: Translated into English for the first time in full, 1897,
by T. T. Allen.]

Protestant self-will, mystical private emotion--these were in turn
met by the champion of tradition, and, as he trusted, were subdued.
Another danger he perceived, not in the unregenerate will or wandering
heart, but in the critical intelligence. Bossuet again was right in
viewing with alarm the Biblical studies of Richard Simon. But his
scholarship was here defective. He succeeded in suppressing an
edition of the _Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament_. There were
printers in Holland beyond the reach of Bossuet's arm; and Simon
continued the work which others have carried further with the aids
of more exact science.

To doubt the government of His world by the Divine Ruler, who assigns
us our duty and our place, is to sap the principles of authority and
of obedience. The doctrine of God's providence is at the centre of
all Bossuet's system of thought, at the heart of his loyal passions.
On earth, the powers that be; in France, the monarch; in heaven, a
greater Monarch (we will not say a magnified Louis XIV.) presiding
over all the affairs of this globe. When Bossuet tried to educate
his indocile pupil the Da