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to the promptings of his missionary instincts. Arguments, pleas, controversies in pamphlet and sermon, marked the progress of his curacy. Success rewarded his efforts. Not a few Protestants seem to have listened to his persuasive voice and abjured their errors. As for the Jews he was probably forced to content himself with his repeated expositions of the oneness of Judaism and Christianity, the former the forerunner of the latter, and the latter developed and defined by the successive councils of the Catholic Church. While the immediate consequences of these constant arguments escape us, their later results are discernible in the remarkable use of Scriptural phrases and similes, for which Bossuet's sermons and funeral orations are distinguished. They also, without much doubt, contributed in fixing on Bossuet's mind the fundamental conception that the birth of Christ is the central event of the world's history.

After seven years of polemics with unbelievers, and pastoral guidance of the faithful, Bossuet was called to Paris as a preacher. This was in 1659. Released from parish duties he could wholly devote himself to expounding and exhorting. His experience at Metz had formed his thought and style, and the series of great sermons for Lent and Advent, which begin in 1660, show how complete was his religious and intellectual equipment. Interspersed with the sermons are occasional eulogies of departed colleagues. In 1667 these eulogies, or funeral orations, acquire greater prominence because of the rank of the persons whom they eulogize, Anne of Austria, Henrietta of France and Henrietta of England. The oration on Henrietta of England marks the culmination of Bossuet's development as a religious orator.

In 1669 Bossuet was appointed bishop of the obscure diocese of Condom. He held this post but two years, for in 1670 he was made preceptor to the Dauphin, and retired from church work in order to perfect himself as a tutor. During the next decade he rarely appeared in the pulpit, but his pen was busy in preparing pious and historical treatises for the edification of

his pupil. The Discours sur l'Histoire universelle, in 1681, signalizes the limit of this pedagogical digression and marks the return of Bossuet to the pastorate. For in this same year he was nominated to the bishopric of Meaux, and began anew his activity as a preacher and a polemist. The question of the extent of the Pope's authority in the affairs of the Church in France had been raised. A council of the French clergy was called to deliberate on the matter. Bossuet could not remain indifferent, and his sermon, Sur l'Unité de l'Eglise, preached early in 1682, foretold the declaration in favor of the liberty of the Gallican Church which this council adopted a few months later. He also responded again to the demand for funeral orations. Yet he was never convinced of the usefulness of such preaching, and in the eulogy of his patron and friend, the Prince of Condé, in 1687, he took occasion to announce his retirement from a field, which in his eyes lay outside the calling of a priest.

This withdrawal, however, gave Bossuet all the more leisure for controversy. He renewed his attack on the Protestants with his Histoire des variations des Eglises protestantes (1688). His distrust of the influences of the stage was expressed in the Maximes et Réflexions sur la Comédie (1693). In the absorbing affair of the Quietists (1696–1698) he admonished the erratic Fénelon in the name of good sense, moderation and sound doctrine. Meanwhile he was laboring with unflagging ardor among his parishes. Only in 1700 did the inroads of a lasting malady place any check on his physical exertions. Yet though hindered in the personal superintendence of his diocese, he still bore himself as a staunch defender of the faith. The attitude of the Protestants toward Church tradition had been among his first concerns. It was also among his last, and his militant spirit again found occasion to reproach the dissenters for their denial of ecclesiastical authority and their rejection of the opinions of the Fathers. And so he debated and argued to the very end, until death relieved him at his post on April 12, 1704.

The foundation of Bossuet's character is reverence for order, for what is regular, accepted, for ideas confirmed by the wisdom of generations. In these particulars he is an excellent representative of his age and nation. He stands as a supporter of the tenets formulated by the Church, as a partisan of absolute rule in the state. Bossuet is the reverse of an individualist. He opposed the Protestants because they were separatists, antagonists of established dogmas in religion, enemies of the theory of the divine right of kings in politics. His belief that the world is best served by unity of creed and uniformity of government was based on his temperament and buttressed by his experience. This belief furnishes the explanation of Bossuet, missionary and sermonizer. Judaism having evolved into Christianity, the Jewish religion of modern times is contrary to nature, an anachronism. The Christianity of the first century, having been developed and expounded by the deliberations of the elect for many centuries, all efforts looking towards a return to this primitive faith necessarily result in factional strife, where each man interprets as he may desire and becomes a law to himself. Furthermore, since the growth of the monarchical idea had been contemporaneous with the growth of the idea of the Church, and because these two social phenomena had been closely connected, the enemies of kings were the foes of the Church. And it must be admitted that the history of Europe down to Bossuet's time had borne witness to the correctness of this reasoning. Hence Bossuet's failure to judge Charles I, Louis XIV, Charles II and the Duke of Orleans (see pages 19, 21, 40, 138 etc.) as they are now judged. With him their personal interests were inextricably interwoven with the interests of the Church, and a blow which would reach them would fall on the Church also. Political liberty and religious anarchy were one and the same to Bossuet. We need not wonder, therefore, at his whole-hearted espousal of the cause of princes against their subjects.

Yet it would be quite unjust to stress this characteristic of

Bossuet overmuch. Our attention is naturally drawn to it because the man lives for us mainly in his writings, and in them, whether hortatory, controversial or historical in essence, he loses no opportunity to enjoin respect for tradition in both Church and state. But another side appears even here, and shows the real heart of the theologian, the animating impulse of a career the daily activity of which escapes the eye of posterity. It is Bossuet the evangelist, the seeker after souls, the shepherd of the sheep. In many of his sermons, as those Sur l'Honneur du Monde and Sur la Mort, in some funeral orations, particularly the eulogy of Henrietta of England, it is remarkable how the simplicity of Bossuet's heart and the purity of his faith cause him to lose sight of his interest in dogma and his zeal for the supremacy of the Church. These works, and others also, convince us that Bossuet's view of his duty as a citizen, his intercourse with the court, his personal esteem for Louis XIV and the English princes, never once obscured to his vision the fundamental truth that without God's grace man is vanity, that high and low, rulers and ruled, those burdened with the affairs of an empire or pressed down by the cares of a struggling existence, are alike in the presence of the Creator and are equally dependent on his mercy.

Should we cite a specific instance where these two sides of Bossuet's nature are fairly blended, where the pastor and the champion of the Church join, we would take the Discours sur l'Histoire universelle. For we read there how the progress of the world, from the earliest ages, had been conditioned by the evolution of the Jewish and Christian religion. The proclamation of the Gospel had been prepared by God's dealings with the Hebrews and preluded by all the events which had taken place even among the heathen. The real reason for the creation of man is to be found in his redemption through Christ. The rise and fall of empires are but illustrations of this great fact. It is God's providence, therefore, and not the working out of blind forces, which leads humanity along its earthly way,

and this same providence sanctifies all individual trials and triumphs to the common end of universal salvation.

The funeral orations of Bossuet are the works by which he is most widely known, and which, perhaps, best constitute his title to fame. Funeral orations, before his day, were eulogies, panegyrics for the most part, in which there was but little substance or regard for style. Bossuet's idea of his priestly mission

did not allow him to be satisfied with such productions. (In taking up the funeral oration, he remodelled it, gave it the general outline and plan of a sermon, made it part of the church service, not only praised the dead, but drew lessons from their departed greatness for the admonition of the living. And he vitalized it with his own earnest spirit. His aggressive temperament was well suited to the display of oratory. It supplied the chief characteristics of his style, such as force, directness, flow, eloquence, sublimity even. The results of his study of the Scriptures are revealed in his language, which reproduces on many occasions the picturesqueness, grandeur and pathos of the Old Testament. He exhorts openly, like a prophet of Israel, strengthening his appeals with an abundance of rhetoric which was natural to him. But the form he keeps subservient to the thought. His constant affirmation of the vanity of earthly greatness implies the necessity of finding true nobility in God. The highest type of eloquence which the classical period of French literature could create is a direct agent in urging man to seek the way of salvation.

In the preparation of this edition the funeral orations on Madame and the Prince of Condé have been reprinted from the editor's French Prose of the XVII Century, and have retained their original pagination. Prefixed to them are the exordiums of two of Bossuet's sermons of the first grade — from which the orations have drawn much of their thought and language — and the funeral oration on Henrietta of France.

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