exacting in his demands than Father Bourdaloue, susceptible now and then of mystic ideas, as is proved by his letters to Sister Cornuau, he did not let himself be won by the vague ecstasies of absolute (pure) love; he had a mind large enough to say, like Mother Angelica Arnauld, “I am of all saints’ order, and all saints are of my order; “but his preferences always inclined towards those saints and learned doctors who had not carried any religious tendency to excess, and who had known how to rest content with the spirit of a rule and a faith that were practical.  A wonderful genius, discovering by flashes, and as if by instinct, the most profound truths of human nature, and giving them expression in an incomparable style, forcing, straining the language to make it render his idea, darting at one bound to the sublimest height by use of the simplest terms, which he, so to speak, bore away with him, wresting them from their natural and proper signification.  “There, in spite of that great heart of hers, is that princess so admired and so beloved; there, such as Death has made her for us!” Bossuet alone could speak like that.

He was writing incessantly, all the while that he was preaching at Meaux and at Paris, making funeral orations over the queen, Maria Theresa, over the Princess Palatine, Michael Le Tellier, and the Prince of Conde.  The Edict of Nantes had just been revoked; controversy with the Protestant ministers, headed by Claude and Jurieu, occupied a great space in the life of the Bishop of Meaux.  He at that time wrote his Histoire des Variations, often unjust and violent, always able in its attacks upon the Reformation; he did not import any zeal into persecution, though all the while admitting unreservedly the doctrines universally propagated amongst Catholics.  “I declare,” he wrote to M. de Baville, “that I am and have always been of opinion, first, that princes may by penal laws constrain all heretics to conform to the profession and practices of the Catholic church; secondly, that this doctrine ought to be held invariable in the church, which has not only conformed to, but has even demanded, similar ordinances from princes.”  He at the same time opposed the constraint put upon the new converts to oblige them to go to mass, without requiring from them any other act of religion.

“When the emperors imposed a like obligation on the Donatists,” he wrote to the Bishop of Mirepoix, “it was on the supposition that they were converted, or would be; but the heretics at the present time, who declare themselves by not fulfilling their Easter (communicating), ought to be rather hindered from assisting at the mysteries than constrained thereto, and the more so in that it appears to be a consequence thereof to constrain them likewise to fulfil their Easter, which is expressly to give occasion for frightful sacrilege.  They might be constrained to undergo instruction; but, so far as I can learn, that would hardly advance matters, and I think that we must be