erent ways, from the regular Romish system. The spiritual
and semi-mystical piety of Fenelon detached him from the trenchant
dogmatism which, since the Council of Trent, had been stamped so much
more decisively than heretofore upon Roman tenets. Pascal,
notwithstanding his mediaevalism, and the humble submissiveness which he
acknowledged to be due to the Papal see, not only fascinated cultivated
readers by the brilliancy of his style, not only won their hearts by the
simple truthfulness and integrity of his character, but delighted
Englishmen generally by the vigour of the attack with which, as leader
of the Jansenists, he led the assault upon the Jesuits. Bossuet's noble
defence of the Gallican liberties appealed still more directly to the
sympathies of this nation. It reminded men of the conflict that had
been fought and won on English soil, and encouraged too sanguine hopes
that it might issue in a reformation within the sister country, not
perhaps so complete as that which had taken place among ourselves, but
not less full of promise. In the midst of the war that was raging
between the rival forms of belief, English theologians of all opinions
were pleased with his graceful recognition, in the name of the French
clergy, of the services rendered to religion by Bishop Bull's learned
'Judgment of the Catholic Church.'[303]

Some time after the death of Bossuet, the renewed resistance which was
being made in France against Papal usurpations gave rise to action on
the part of the primate of our Church, which in the sixteenth century
might have been cordially followed up in England, but in the eighteenth
was very generally misunderstood and misrepresented. Archbishop Wake had
taken a very distinguished part in the Roman controversy, directing his
special attention to the polemical works of Bossuet, but had always
handled these topics in a broader and more generous tone than many of
his contemporaries. In 1717, at a time when many of the French bishops
and clergy, headed by the Sorbonne, and by the Cardinal de Noailles,
were indignantly protesting against the bondage imposed upon them by the
Bull Unigenitus, and were proposing to appeal from the Pope to a general
council, a communication was received by Archbishop Wake,[304] that Du
Pin, head of the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, had expressed
himself in favour of a possible union with the English Church.[305] The
idea was warmly favoured by De Gerardin, another emine