he taste of Mascaron (1634-1703), whose unequal
rhetoric was at its best in his panegyric of Turenne; more to the
taste of the elegant FLECHIER, Bishop of Nimes. All the literary
graces were cultivated by Flechier (1632-1710), and his eloquence
is unquestionable; but it was not the eloquence proper to the pulpit.
He was a man of letters, a man of the world, formed in the school
of preciosity, a haunter of the Hotel de Rambouillet; knowing the
surface of society, he knew as a moralist how to depict its manners
and the evil that lay in them. He did not apply doctrine to life like
Bossuet, nor search the heart with Bourdaloue's serious zeal; to save
souls was indeed important; to exhibit his talents before the King
was also important. But the true eloquence of the pulpit has deeper
springs than lay in Flechier's mundane spirit. Already the decadence
has begun.

Protestantism had its preacher in JACQUES SAURIN (1677-1730), clear,
logical, energetic, with negligences of style and sudden flashes of
genius. But he belongs to London, to Geneva, to the Hague more perhaps
than to France. An autumnal colouring, bright and abundant, yet
indicative of the decline, is displayed in the discourses of the
latest of the great pulpit orators, JEAN-BAPTISTE MASSILLON
(1663-1742), who belongs more to the eighteenth than to the
seventeenth century. "He must increase," said Bourdaloue, "but I must
decrease." Massillon, with gifts of person and of natural grace,
sensitive, tender, a student and professor of the rhetorical art,
sincerely devout, yet with waverings towards the world, had something
in his genius that resembled Racine. A pathetic sentiment, a feeling
for human passions, give his sermons qualities which contrast with
the severer manner of Bourdaloue. They are simple in plan; the
preacher's art lay in deploying and developing a few ideas, and
infusing into them an imaginative sensibility; he is facile and
abundant; faultless in amenity, but deficient in force and fire. Yet
the opening words of the Funeral Oration on Louis XIV.--"God alone
is great, my brethren"--are noble in their simplicity; and the thought
of Jesus suddenly appearing in "the most august assembly of the
world"--in the chapel at Versailles--startled the hearers of the
sermon on the "small number of the elect." "There is an orator!" cried
the actor Baron, "we are only comedians;" but no actor would have
instituted a comparison between himself and Bourdaloue. "When o