ll 1642, when he went up to the
college of Navarre in Paris to begin the study of theology; for a pious
mother had brought him up to look on the priesthood as his natural
vocation. At Navarre he gained a great reputation for hard work;
fellow-students nicknamed him _Bos suetus aratro_--an ox broken in to
the plough. But his abilities became known beyond the college walls. He
was taken up by the Hotel de Rambouillet, a great centre of aristocratic
culture and the original home of the _Precieuses_. Here he became the
subject of a celebrated experiment. A dispute having arisen about
extempore preaching, the boy of sixteen was put up, late one night, to
deliver an impromptu discourse. He acquitted himself as well as in more
conventional examinations. In 1652 he took a brilliant degree in
divinity, and was ordained priest. The next seven years he spent at
Metz, where his father's influence had got him a canonry at the early
age of thirteen; to this was now added the more important office of
archdeacon. He was plunged at once into the thick of controversy; for
nearly half Metz was Protestant, and Bossuet's first appearance in print
was a refutation of the Huguenot pastor Paul Ferry (1655). To reconcile
the Protestants with the Roman Church became the great object of his
dreams; and for this purpose he began to train himself carefully for the
pulpit, an all-important centre of influence in a land where political
assemblies were unknown, and novels and newspapers scarcely born. Not
that he reached perfection at a bound. His youthful imagination was
unbridled, and his ideas ran easily into a kind of paradoxical subtlety,
redolent of the divinity school. But these blemishes vanished when he
settled in Paris (1659), and three years later mounted the pulpit of the
Chapel Royal.

In Paris the congregations had no mercy on purely clerical logic or
clerical taste; if a preacher wished to catch their ear, he must manage
to address them in terms they would agree to consider sensible and
well-bred. Not that Bossuet thought too much of their good opinion.
Having very stern ideas of the dignity of a priest, he refused to
descend to the usual devices for arousing popular interest. The
narrative element in his sermons grows shorter with each year. He never
drew satirical pictures, like his great rival Bourdaloue. He would not
write out his discourses in full, much less learn them off by heart: of
the two hundred printed in his _Works_ all bu