hic Ruler of
Bossuet's imagination. He was not an original thinker; he would have
scorned such a distinction--"l'heretique est celui qui a une
opinion"; he had received the truth, and only gave it extended
applications. He is "le sublime orateur des idees communes."

More than an orator, before all else he was a combatant. Falling at
his post as the eighteenth century opened, he is like some majestic,
white-haired paladin of old romances which tell of the strife between
French chivalry and the Saracenic hordes. Bossuet fell; the age of
growing incredulity and novel faiths was inaugurated; the infidels
passed over the body of the champion of conservative tradition.

II

Bossuet's contemporaries esteemed him as a preacher less highly than
they esteemed the Jesuit Bourdaloue. The life of LOUIS BOURDALOUE
(1632-1704) is told in the words of Vinet: "He preached, confessed,
consoled, and then he died." It does credit to his hearers that they
valued him aright--a modest man of simple probity. He spoke, with
downcast eyes and full harmonious voice, as a soul to souls; his
eloquence was not that of the rhetorician; his words were grave and
plain and living, and were pressed home with the force of their reality.
He aimed never at display, but always at conviction. When the crowd
at St. Sulpice was moved as he entered the church and ascended the
pulpit, "Silence!" cried the Prince de Conde, "there is our enemy!"
Bourdaloue marshalled his arguments and expositions with the
elaborate skill of a tactician; he sought to capture the judgment;
he reached the heart through a wise director's knowledge of its inmost
processes. When his words were touched with emotion, it was the
involuntary manifestation of the life within him. His studies of
character sometimes tended to the form of portraits of moral types,
features in which could be identified with actual persons; but in
these he was the moralist, not the satirist. During four-and-thirty
years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread
of life--plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands,
never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He
does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is better--he
nourishes.

Bourdaloue pronounced only two _Oraisons Funebres_, and those under
the constraint of duty. He thought the Christian pulpit was meant
for less worldly uses than the eulogy of mortal men. The _Oraison
Funebre_ was more to t