hould be commissioned to define heresy? So M. de St. Cyran was
condemned.

He had been already by an enemy more formidable than the assemblies of
the clergy of France. Cardinal Richelieu, naturally attracted towards
greatness as he was at a later period towards the infant prodigy of the
Pascals, had been desirous of attaching St. Cyran to himself.
"Gentlemen," said he one day, as he led back the simple priest into the
midst of a throng of his courtiers, "here you see the most learned man in
Europe." But the Abbot of St. Cyran would accept no yoke but God's: he
remained independent, and perhaps hostile, pursuing, without troubling
himself about the cardinal, the great task he had undertaken. Having
had, for two years past, the spiritual direction of the convent of Port
Royal, he had found in Mother Angelica Arnauld, the superior and reformer
of the monastery, in her sister, Mother Agnes, and in the nuns of their
order, souls worthy of him and capable of tolerating his austere
instructions.

Before long he had seen forming, beside Port Royal and in the solitude of
the fields, a nucleus of penitents, emulous of the hermits of the desert.
M. Le Maitre, Mother Angelica's nephew, a celebrated advocate in the
Parliament of Paris, had quitted all "to have no speech but with God."
A howling (_rugissant_) penitent, he had drawn after him his brothers,
MM. de Sacy and de Sericourt, and, ere long, young Lancelot, the learned
author of Greek roots: all steeped in the rigors of penitential life, all
blindly submissive to M. de St. Cyran and his saintly requirements. The
director's power over so many eminent minds became too great. Richelieu
had comprehended better than the bishops the tendency of M. de St.
Cyran's ideas and writings. "He continued to publish many opinions, new
and leading to dangerous conclusions," says Father Joseph in his
_Memoires,_" in such sort that the king, being advertised, commanded him
to be kept a prisoner in the Bois de Vincennes." "That man is worse than
six armies," said Cardinal Richelieu; "if Luther and, Calvin had been
shut up when they began to dogmatize, states would have been spared a
great deal of trouble."

The consciences of men and the ardor of their souls are not so easily
stifled by prison or exile. The Abbot of St. Cyran, in spite of the
entreaties of his powerful friends, remained at Vincennes up to the death
of Cardinal Richelieu; the seclusionists of Port Royal were driven fr