ed by the heresy in that, perhaps, he felt himself attracted
thereto by a secret affinity. He was already dying when there appeared
the book Frequente Communion, by M. Arnauld, youngest son and twentieth
child of that illustrious family of Arnaulds in whom Jansenism seemed to
be personified. The author was immediately accused at Rome, and buried
himself for twenty years in retirement. M. de St. Cyran was still
working, dictating Christian thoughts and points touching death.
_Stantem mori oportet_ (One should die in harness), he would say. On the
3d of October, 1643, he succumbed suddenly, in the arms of his friends.
"I cast my eyes upon the body, which was still in the same posture in
which death had left it," writes Lancelot, "and I thought it so full of
majesty and of mien so dignified that I could not tire of admiring it,
and I fancied that he would still have been capable, in the state in
which he was, of striking with awe the most passionate of his foes, had
they seen him." It was the most cruel blow that could have fallen upon
the pious nuns of Port-Royal. "_Dominus in coelo!_ (Lord in heaven!)"
was all that was said by Mother Angelica Arnauld, who, like M. de St.
Cyran himself, centred all her thoughts and all her affections upon
eternity.

With his dying breath M. de St. Cyran had said to M. Gudrin, physician to
the college of Jesuits, "Sir, tell your Fathers, when I am dead, not to
triumph, and that I leave behind me a dozen stronger than I." With all
his penetration the director of consciences was mistaken; none of those
he left behind him would have done his work; he had inspired with the
same ardor and the same constancy the strong and the weak, the violent
and the pacific; he had breathed his mighty faith into the most diverse
souls, fired with the same zeal penitents and nuns, men rescued from the
scorching furnace of life in the world, and women brought up from infancy
in the shade of the cloister. M. Arnauld was a great theologian, an
indefatigable controversialist, the oracle and guide of his friends in
their struggle against the Jesuits; M. de Sacy and M. Singlin were wise
and able directors, as austere as M. de St. Cyran in their requirements,
less domineering and less rough than he; but M. de St. Cyran alone was
and could be the head of Jansenism; he alone could have inspired that
idea of immolation of the whole being to the sovereign will of God, as to
the truth which resides in Him alone.