however specious the pretext or solemn the guise which such folly may assume. He is assured that filial affection, cheerfully, temperately, bountifully, and thankfully using the .gifts of Heaven, is the best tribute which man can render to Him who claims for himself the name and the character of a Father. But with all this knowledge, the disciple of Luther or of Calvin will yet close the vies edificates and the necrologies of these holy women, not without a reluctance to doubt, and a wish to believe, that they really occupied the high and awful station to which they aspired; and stood apart from the world, its pollutions, and its cares, to offer with purer hearts than others, and with more acceptable intercessions, the sacrifice of an uninterrupted worship, replete with blessings to themselves and to mankind. Peace then to their errors, and unquoted be any of the innumerable extravagances which abound in the records of their lives. To the recluses who shared, without ever breaking their solitude, we rather turn for illustrations of the spirit which animated and characterized the valley of Port-Royal. On the pacification of Clement IX., Louis Sebastian le Nain de Tillemont, who had been educated in the schools of Nicole and Lancelot, returned in the maturity of his manhood to a hermitage which he had erected near the courtyard of the abbey. Such had been his attainments as a boy, that the pupil had soon exhausted the resources of those profound teachers, and in his twentieth year had commenced those works on ecclesiastical history, which have placed him in the very foremost rank, if not at the head, of all who have laboured in that fertile though rugged field. To the culture of it, his life was unceasingly devoted. Though under the direction of De Saci he had obtained admission to holy orders, he refused all the rich preferments pressed on him by the admirers of his genius. Year after year passed over him, unmarked by any event which even the pen of his affectionate biographer, Fontaine, could record. "He lived," says that amiable writer, "alone, and with no witness but God himself, who was ever present with him, and who was all in all to him." It was only in an habitual and placid communion with that one associate, that he sought relief from his gigantic toils; and with a spirit recruited by that communion, he returned to the society of the emperors, the popes, the fathers, and the saints, who were to him as companions and as friends. To a man long conversant with the anxieties of a secular calling, the soft lights and the harmonious repose of such a picture may perhaps exhibit a delusive aspect; yet it can hardly be a delusion to believe, that for such colloquy with the minds which yet live in books, and with that Mind which is the source of all life, would be well exchanged whatever ambition, society, fame, or fortune, have to confer on their most favoured votaries. So at least judged one, whom fame and fortune wooed with their most alluring smiles. Racine had been trained at Port-Royal, in the same schools and by the same masters as Tillemont. For the great dramatist, no sympathy could of course be expressed by the austere dwellers in the desert; and perhaps the friendship of Boileau may have consoled him for the alienation of his old teacher Nicole. But when, in his visionnaires, that devout and learned man denounced the writers of stage-plays as the Empoisonneurs publics des ames, Racine keenly felt and resented the reproach. Like most controversialists, he lived to repent the asperity of his language: but his repentance yielded fruits, the like of which have rarely been gathered from that bitter stem. The author of Andromaque not only sought the pardon, and regained the friendship of Arnauld and Nicole, but actually renounced the drama, exhorted his son to abandon poetry, and became the advocate and the historian of Port-Royal, and secured for his bones a resting-place in that consecrated soil. Happily for the world, a method was afterwards discovered of reconciling the exercise of Racine's genius with the severe principles which Nicole had instilled into him when a boy, and had revived with such decisive effect in his riper days. Esther and Athalie were allowed, even at Port-Royal, to be works not unseemly for a man whose single talent was that of writing verses, and who, if he could do nothing better, was at least acknowledged to do that well. But alas for human consistency! He who traced those majestic scenes where reliance on the Divine arm triumphs over all human regards and terrors, was doomed himself to pine away and to die of a hard saying of the hard master it was his ill fate to serve. His guilt was to have drawn up a Memoir on the means of relieving the starving poor at Paris. His punishment, the indignant exclamation of the great Louis, "Because he is an all-accomplished versifier, does he presume that he knows every thing? Because he is a great poet, does he mean to become a minister?" Well might the sensitive spirit which such a feather could crush, wish with Wolsey that he had served his God as faithfully as his king, and repine amidst the pageantries of Versailles for the devout composure of Port-Royal. And many were the eminent men who sought and enjoyed that repose. There dwelt the Prince de Conti, one of the heroes of the Fronde, and still more memorable for his penitence and restitutions; of whom it is recorded, that his young children were so impressed by his absolute devotedness to the Divine will, as to conceal from him the story of Abraham, lest the example of the sacrifice of Isaac should be imitated at their own expense. There, too, resided the Duc de Laincourt, on whom fortune had exhausted all her bounties, and who, under the loss of them all, rose to the utmost heroism of a meek, unrepining, and cheerful resignation. Pontchateau, a noble, a courtier, an ambassador, and at length the apostolical prothonotary at Rome, brought all the strange vicissitudes of his life to an end, by becoming, under the name of Le Mercier, a common labourer in the gardens, and a devout worshipper in the church of Port-Royal. But this chronicle of worthies, spreading out into an interminable length, must give place to a very brief account of the events which reduced to | verting that ancient seat of piety and learning. a desert the solitudes which they had culti- The apology soon presented itself. vated and adorned. Amidst the contentions of the Gallican church, full proof had been given of the keen edge of those weapons which might be borrowed from the papal arsenals. It readily occurred to the sufferers, that the resource which the Jesuits had so successfully employed, might be turned against themselves. Pascal had startled the civilized world with the exposure of Molinist errors, hostile not merely to the Catholic creed, but to those principles of virtue which are the very cement of human society. They had imputed to Jansenius five heresies on the obscure subjects of divine grace and human freedom; but who could number the propositions in which Escobar and his associates had spurned the authority of the decalogue itself? The assiduity of the bishops of Arras and St. Pons collected sixty-five of these scandalous dogmas, and these they transmitted to Rome in a memorial of which Nicole was believed to be the writer, and known to be the translator. Righteous, unqualified, and decisive was the papal condemnation of the morality of the Jesuits; but fatal to the repose of Port-Royal was the triumph of one of her brightest ornaments. The duchesse de Longueville had lately died, and with her had disappeared the motive which had induced Louis to show some forbearance to the objects of her affectionate solicitude. Harlai now governed the see of Paris. He was a man of disreputable character, and the mere instrument of the king. Louis was in bondage to Madame de Maintenon, and she to the Jesuits. Their vengeance scarcely sought a pretext, and soon found its gratification. In the exercise of his archiepiscopal authority, Harlai banished De Saci, Tillemont, and Pontchateau, from the valley of Port-Royal. Nicole and Arnauld sought shelter in the Netherlands from his menaces. The postulantes and scholars were once more expelled, and the admission of novices was again forbidden. At this epoch, another lady of the house of Arnauld-a cousin and namesake of the Mère Angelique-was invested with the dignity of abbess. Her genius, her virtue, and her learning, are the subject of eulogies too indistinct to be impressive, and too hyperbolical to win implicit credence. Yet, if she was the writer of the memoir in defence of her monastery which bears her name, there was no apparent obstacle, but her sex and her profession, to her successful rivalry of the greatest masters of juridical eloquence in France. Ineffectual, however, would have been all the rhetoric which ever adorned the parliament of Paris, to avert the threatened doom of the stronghold of Jansenism. As he approached the tomb, Harlai's resentment became more deep and settled. He left it a fatal inheritance to his successor, the cardinal de Noailles. A weak and obstinate, but not unfeeling man, De Noailles owed his promotion to the see of Paris to his fixed hostility to Port-Royal, and his known willingness to hazard the odium of sub Several years had elapsed since the dispute about "Le Droit et le Fait de Jansenius" had apparently reached its close. Revolving this passage of by-gone history, a priest had improved or amused his leisure, by drawing up, for the decision of the Sorbonne, "a case of conscience," which, it must be owned, was a hard problem for the most expert casuist. Of two infallible popes, one had with his dying breath affirmed, as a momentous truth, a proposition, which the other had abandoned, if not retracted. What was it the duty of the faithful to believe on the subject? Forty doctors answered, that it was enough to maintain a respectful silence as to the "fait de Jansenius." Archiepiscopal mandaments, treatises of the learned, royal orders in council, and parliamentary arrêts flew thick and fast through the troubled air, and obscured the daylight of common sense. Again the eldest son of the church invoked the authority of her spiritual father. In oracular darkness went forth from the Vatican, the sentence, that "respectful silence is not a sufficient deference for apostolical constitutions." This is what is called, in ecclesiastical story, the bull "Vineam Domini Sabaoth." Under shelter of an abstract theorem which no Catholic could deny, it ingeniously concealed the conflict of opinion of two infallible pontiffs. Subscription of their unqualified assent to the bull "Vineam" was demanded from the nuns of Port-Royal, and from them alone. They cheerfully subscribed; but with the addition, that their signature was not to be understood as derogating from what had been determined on the pacification of Clement IX. This was their final and their fatal act of contumacy. Decree after decree was fulminated by De Noailles. He forbade the admission of any new members of their house. He prohibited the election of an abbess. He despoiled them of a large part of their estates. He interdicted to them all the sacraments of the church. He obtained a papal bull for the suppression of their monastery; and, in October, 1709, he carried it into effect by an armed force, under the Marquis D'Argenson. There is in Westminster Hall a tradition that an eminent advocate of our own times, addressed to the House of Peers during sixteen successive days a speech, in the course of which (such is the calculation) he employed all the words in Johnson's Dictionary, one with another, just thirty-five times over. Neither boasting the copiousness, nor presuming on the patience which were at the command of that great lawyer, we have compressed into a few sentences the history of a contest, which, if not so abridged, would have swollen to the utmost limits of that unparalleled oration. But to those who have leisure for such studies, and who delight in a well-fought forensic field, we can promise that pleasure in the highest degree from a perusal of the contest between the aged ladies of Port-Royal, and their royal, mitred, and ermined antagonists. Never was a more gallant struggle against injustice. the greater part of her fellow-sufferers, she died with no priestly absolution, and was consigned to an unhallowed grave. They died the martyrs of sincerity; strong in the faith that a lie must ever be hateful in the sight of God, though infallible popes should exact it, or an infallible church, as represented by cardinals and confessors, should persuade it. Unsatiated by the calamities of the nuns, the vengeance of the enemies of Port-Royal was directed against the buildings where they had dwelt, the sacred edifice where they had worshipped, and the tombs in which their dead had been interred. The monastery and the adjacent church were overthrown from their foundations. Workmen, prepared by hard drinking for their task, broke open the graves in which the nuns and recluses of former times had been interred. With obscene ribaldry, and outrages too disgusting to be detailed, they piled up a loathsome heap of bones and corpses, on which the dogs were permitted to feed. What remained was thrown into a pit, prepared for the purpose, near the neighbouring church-yard of St. Lambert. After exhausting all the resources of legal de- | power of man to take away. In common with fence, those helpless and apparently feeble women disputed every inch of ground by protests, remonstrances, and petitions, which, for the moment at least, held their assailants in check, and which yet remain a wondrous monument of their perseverance and capacity, and of the absolute self-control which, amidst the outpourings of their griefs, and the exposure of their wrongs, restrained every expres- | sion of asperity or resentment. Never was the genius of the family of Arnauld exhibited with greater lustre, and never with less effect. In a gray autumnal morning, a long file of armed horsemen, under the command of D'Argenson, was seen to issue from the woods which overhung the ill-fated monastery. In the name of Louis he demanded and obtained admission into that sacred enclosure. Seated on the abbatial throne, he summoned the nuns into his presence. They appeared before him veiled, silent, and submissive. Their papers, their title-deeds, and their property were then seized, and proclamation made of a royal decree which directed their immediate exile. It was instantly carried into effect. Far and wide, along the summits of the neighbouring hills, might be seen a thronging multitude of the peasants whom they had instructed, and of the poor whom they had relieved. Bitter cries of indignation and of grief, joined with fervent prayers, arose from these helpless people, as, one after another, the nuns entered the carriages drawn up for their reception. Each pursued her solitary journey to the prison destined for her. Of these venerable women, some had passed their eightieth year, and the youngest was far advanced in life. Labouring under paralysis and other infirmities of old age, several of them reached at once their prisons and their graves. Others died under the distress and fatigues of their journey. Some possessed energies which no sufferings could subdue. Madame de Remicourt, for example, was kept for two years in solitary confinement; in a cell lighted and ventilated only through the chimney; without fire, society, or books. "You may persecute, but you will never change Madame de Remicourt," said the archbishop; "for" (such was his profound view of the phenomenon) "she has a square head, and people with square heads are always obstinate." Last in the number of exiles appeared at the gates of the abbey, the prioress Louise de St. Anastasie Mesnil de Courtiaux. She had seen her aged sisters one by one quit for ever the abode, the associates, and the employments of their lives. To each she had given her parting benediction. She shed no tear, she breathed no murmur, nor for a moment betrayed the dignity of her office, or the constancy of her mind. "Be faithful to the end," were the last words which she addressed to the last companion of her sorrows. And nobly did she fulfil her own counsels. She was conducted to a convent, where, under a close guard, she was compelled to endure the utmost rigours of a jail. Deprived of all those zeligious comforts which it is in the power of man to minister, she enjoyed a solace, and found a strength, which it was not in the A wooden cross, crected by the villagers, marked the spot where many a pilgrim resorted to pray for the souls of the departed, and for his own. At length no trace remained of the fortress of Jansenism to offend the eye of the Jesuits, or to perpetuate the memory of the illustrious dead with whom they had so long contended. The solitary Gothic arch, the water-mill, and the dovecot, rising from the banks of the pool, with the decayed towers and the farmhouse on the slopes of the valley, are all that now attest that it was once the crowded abode of the wise, the learned, and the good. In that spot, however, may still be seen the winding brook, the verdant hills, and the quiet meadows, nature's indestructible monuments to the devout men and holy women who nurtured there affections which made them lovely in their lives, and hopes which rendered them triumphant in death. Nor in her long roll of martyrs has history to record the names of any who suffered with greater constancy, or in a nobler cause; for their conflict was with the very church they most profoundly revered, and their cause was that of devotedness to sincerity and the abhorrence of falsehood. Amongst the interpreters of the counsels of Divine Providence in that age, there were not wanting many who found, in the calamities which overwhelmed the declining years of Louis, the retribution of an avenging Deity for the wrongs inflicted on Port-Royal. If it were given to man to decipher the mysterious characters engraven on the scroll of this world's history, it might not be difficult to find, in the annals of his reign, other and yet more weighty reasons for the awakening of Nemesis in France at the commencement of the eighteenth century. But of the mere chronological fact, there is no doubt. The details of the three Dauphins, and the victories of Eugene and Marlborough, followed hard on the dispersion of the nuns. With his dying breath, Louis cast the responsibility on the Jesuits who stood round his bed. "If, indeed, vou caste, bodily penances and costly expiations, and the constant intervention of man, and of the works of man, between the worshipper and the supreme object of his worship. So long as human nature shall continue what it is, the religion of human nature will be unchanged. The Church of Rome will be eternal, if man, such as he now is, is himself eternal. have misled and deceived me"-such was his | compromise, the indications have been the last address to his confessors-"you are deeply same-a worshipper of pomp and ceremonial, guilty, for in truth I acted in good faith. I a spiritual despotism exercised by a sacerdotal sincerely sought the peace of the church." The humiliation of his spiritual advisers quickly followed. It was preceded by the retirement and death of Madame de Maintenon, who had both provoked and derided the sufferings of the Port-Royalists. The very type of mediocrity out of place, she is to our mind the least winning of all the ladies of equivocal or desperate reputation who in modern times have stood on the steps of European thrones. Her power was sustained by the feebleness of the mind she had subdued, and by the craftiness of those who had subjugated her own. Her prudery and her religiousness, such as it was, served but to deepen the aversion which her intriguing, selfish, narrow-minded, and bigoted spirit excite and justify; although, in her own view of the matter, she probably hoped to propitiate the favour of Heaven and the applause of the world, by directing against the unoffending women of Port-Royal the deadly wrath of the worn-out debauchee, whose jaded spirits and unquiet conscience it was her daily task to sustain and flatter. De Noailles, the instrument of her cruelty, lived to bewail his guilt with such strange agonies of remorse as to rescue his memory from all feelings of hatred, although it is difficult to contemplate without some failure of respect, the exhibition of emotions, which, however just in themselves, deprived their victim of all powers of self-control, and of every semblance of decorous composure. His howlings are described by the witness of them, to have been more like those of a wild beast or a maniac, than of a reasonable man. But for every labour under the sun, says the Wise Man, there is a time. There is a time for bearing testimony against the errors of Rome, why not also a time for testifying to the sublime virtues with which those errors have been so often associated? Are we for ever to admit and never to practise the duties of kindness and mutual forbearance? Does Christianity consist in a vivid perception of the faults, and an obtuse blindness to the merits of those who differ from us? Is charity a virtue only when we ourselves are the objects of it? Is there not a church as pure and more catholic than those of Oxford or Rome-a church com prehending within its limits every human being who, according to the measure of the know ledge placed within his reach, strives habitually to be conformed to the will of the common Father of us all? To indulge hope beyond the pale of some narrow communion, has, by each Christian society in its turn, been denounced as a daring presumption. Yet the hope has come to all, and with her faith and charity, her inseparable companions. Amidst the shock of contending creeds, and the uproar of anathemas, they who have ears to hear, and hearts to understand, have listened to gentler and If these slight notices of the heroes and more kindly sounds. Good men may debate heroines of Port-Royal, (slight indeed, when as polemics, but they will feel as Christians. compared with the original materials from On the universal mind of Christendom is indewhich they have been drawn,) should be as-libly engraven one image, towards which the cribed by any one to a pen plighted to do suit and service to the cause of Rome, no surmise could be wider of the mark. No Protestant can read the writings of the Port-Royalists themselves, without gratitude for his deliver ance from the superstitions of a church which calls herself Catholic, and boasts that she is eternal. That the Church of Rome may flourish as long as the race of man shall endure, is indeed a conclusion which may reasonably be adopted by him who divines the future only from the past. For where is the land, or what the historical period, in which a conspicuous place has not been held by phenomena essentially the same, however circumstantially different? In what age has man not been a worshipper of the visible? In what country has imagination-the sensuous property of the nind-failed to triumph over those mental powers which are purely contemplative? Who can discover a period in which religion has not more or less assumed the form of a compromise between the self-dependence and the self-distrust of her votaries-between their abasement to human authority and their conviction of its worthlessness-between their awe of the divine power and their habitual revolt against the divine will? Of every such eyes of all are more or less earnestly directed. Whoever has himself caught any resemblance, however faint and imperfect, to that divine and benignant Original, has in his measure learned to recognise a brother wherever he can discern the same resemblance.* There is an essential unity in that kingdom which is not of this world. But within the provinces of that mighty state there is room for endless varieties of administration, and for local laws and customs widely differing from each other. The unity consists in the one object of worship-the one object of affiancethe one source of virtue-the one cementing principle of mutual love, which pervade and animate the whole. The diversities are, and must be, as numerous and intractable as are the essential distinctions which nature, habit, and circumstances have created amongst men. Uniformity of creeds, of discipline, of ritual, and of ceremonies, in such a world as ours!— See on this subject a book entitled “Catholic Christianity," the anonymous work of the Rev. E. M'Vicar, now a minister of the Church of Scotland in Ceylon. Why such a book should not have attained an exten sive celebrity, or why such a writer should have been which we fear no satisfactory answer could be given permitted to quit his native land, are questions to by the dispensers of fame or of church preferment a world where no two men are not as distin- Our minds are steeped in imagery; and where guishable in their mental as in their physical the visible form is not, the impalpable spirit aspect; where every petty community has its escapes the notice of the unreflecting multiseparate system of civil government; where tude. In common hands, analysis stops at the all that meets the eye, and all that arrests the species or the genus, and cannot rise to the ear, has the stamp of boundless and infinite order or the class. To distinguish birds from variety! What are the harmonies of tone, of fishes, beasts from insects, limits the efforts of colour, and of form, but the result of contrasts the vulgar observer of the face of nature. But -of contrasts held in subordination to one Cuvier could trace the sublime unity, the unipervading principle, which reconciles without versal type, the fontal Idea existing in the confounding the component elements of the creative intelligence, which connects as one music, the painting, or the structure? In the the mammoth and the snail. So, common obphysical works of God, beauty could have no servers can distinguish from each other the existence without endless diversities. Why different varieties of religious society, and can assume that in religious society-a work not rise no higher. Where one assembly worships less surely to be ascribed to the supreme with harmonies of music, fumes of incense, author of all things-this law is absolutely ancient liturgies, and a gorgeous ceremonial, reversed? Were it possible to subdue that and another listens to the unaided voice of a innate tendency of the human mind, which single pastor, they can perceive and record compels men to differ in religious opinions the differences; but the hidden ties which and observances, at least as widely as on all unite them both escape such observation. All other subjects, what would be the results of appears as contrast, and all ministers to antisuch a triumph? Where would then be the pathy and discord. It is our belief that these free comparison, and the continual enlarge- things may be rightly viewed in a different ment of thought; where the self-distrusts which aspect, and yet with the most severe conforare the springs of humility, or the mutual de- mity to the divine will, whether as intimated pendencies which are the bonds of love? He by natural religion, or as revealed in holy who made us with this infinite variety in our scripture. We believe that, in the judgment intellectual and physical constitution, must of an enlightened charity, many Christian sohave foreseen, and foreseeing, must have in- cieties, who are accustomed to denounce each tended, a corresponding dissimilarity in the other's errors, will at length come to be reopinions of his creatures on all questions sub-garded as members in common of the one mitted to their judgment, and proposed for their acceptance. For truth is his law; and if all will profess to think alike, all must live in the habitual violation of it. great and comprehensive church, in which diversities of forms are harmonized by an allpervading unity of spirit. For ourselves, at least, we should deeply regret to conclude that Zeal for uniformity attests the latent dis- we were aliens from that great Christian comtrusts, not the firm convictions of the zealot. monwealth of which the nuns and recluses In proportion to the strength of our self-reli- of the valley of Port-Royal were members, ance, is our indifference to the multiplication and members assuredly of no common excelof suffrages in favour of our own judgment.lence. IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND HIS ASSOCIATES." [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1842.] On the dawn of the day which, in the year | martyrdom. With a stately though halting 1534, the Church of Rome celebrated the feast gait, as one accustomed to military command, of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, a little company of men, whose vestments bespoke their religious character, emerged in solemn procession from the deep shadows cast by the towers of Notre Dame over the silent city below them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the chant of the matins appropriate to that sacred season, they climbed the hill of martyrs, and descended into the crypt, which then ascertained the spot where the apostle of France had won the crown of * Exercitia Spiritualla S. P. Ignatii Loyola, cum Versione literali ex Autographo Hispanico præmittuntur R. P. JOANNIS ROOTHMEN, præpositi Generalis Societatis, Jesu, Litere Encyclia ad Patres et Fratres ejusdem Societatis, de Spiritualium Exercitiarum S. P. N, Studio et Usu. Londini, typis C. Richards. 1837. marched at their head a man of swarthy complexion, bald-headed and of middle stature, who had passed the meridian of life: his deepset eyes glowing as with a perennial fire, from beneath brows, which, had phrenology then been born, she might have portrayed in her loftiest style, but which, without her aid, announced a commission from on high to subjugate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed, was the aspect of Ignatius Loyola, that, during the sixteenth century few, if any of the books of his order appeared without the impress of that imperial countenance. Beside him in the chapel of St. Denys knelt another worshipper, whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear blue eye, and finely-chiseled features, contrasted strangely with the solemnities in which he was |