sonable
piety whom I named above. By means of congregations of a fresh type,
distinct from the old monkish rules and in some points copied from
the Jesuits, they created the seminary, that is to say the well-walled
nursery in which young clerks could be trained and formed. The
transformation was far extending. The schools of these powerful
teachers of the spiritual life turned out a body of men representing
the best disciplined, the most orderly, the most national, and it
maybe added, the most highly educated clergy ever seen--a clergy which
illustrated the second half of the seventeenth century and the whole
of the eighteenth, and the last of whose representatives have only
disappeared within the last forty years. Concurrently with these
exertions of orthodox piety arose Port-Royal, which was far superior
to St. Sulpice, to St. Lazare, to the Christian doctrine, and even
to the Oratoire, as regarded consistency in reasoning and talent in
writing, but which lacked the most essential of Catholic virtues,
docility. Port-Royal, like Protestantism, passed through every phase
of misfortune. It was distasteful to the majority, and was always in
opposition. When you have excited the antipathy of your country you
are too often led to take a dislike to your country. The persecuted
one is doubly to be pitied, for, in addition to the suffering which he
endures, persecution affects him morally; it rarely fails to warp the
mind and to shrink the heart.

Olier occupies a place apart in this group of Catholic reformers. His
mysticism is of a kind peculiar to himself. His _Cathechisme chretien
pour la Vie interieure_, which is scarcely ever read outside
St. Sulpice, is a most remarkable book, full of poesy and sombre
philosophy, wavering from first to last between Louis de Leon and
Spinoza. Olier's ideal of the Christian life is what he calls "the
state of death."

"What is the state of death?--It is a state during which the heart
cannot be moved to its depths, and though the world displays to it its
beauties, its honours, and its riches, the effect is the same as if it
offered them to a corpse, which remains motionless, and devoid of all
desire, insensible to all that goes on.... The corpse may be agitated
outwardly, and have some movement of the body; but this agitation
is all on the surface; it does not come from the inner man, which is
without life, vigour, or strength. Thus a soul which is dead within
may easily be attached by