These were the times when Bossuet’s utterances grew in power and magnificence.  He was heard in a number of Parisian churches; he was heard at court, where he several times was appointed preacher either for Advent or Lent; he delivered panegyrics of saints, and was called upon to eulogize in death those who had held the highest rank in life.  He had just delivered the most splendid and the most touching of his funeral orations, those on Henrietta of France, widow of Charles I. of England (November 16th, 1669), and less than a year later, on her unfortunate daughter, Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans (August 21st, 1670), when the King, at the request of the upright Duke de Montausier, called him to court from the bishopric of Condom to which he had been raised, and intrusted to him the education of his son and heir-apparent, the Dauphin of France.

Bossuet’s royal pupil never reigned.  He died in 1711, four years before his father’s death:  and it must be admitted that during the thirty-one years that elapsed between the moment when he came out of Bossuet’s hands and the end of his life, he gave no evidence of being anything except a very commonplace sort of a man.  No such halo surrounds him as surrounds his unfortunate son, the Duke of Burgundy, whose death two years after that of the Dauphin was mourned as a public calamity.  Whether Bossuet’s failure to make a great prince out of the Dauphin was due to a faulty system of education or to the unresponsive nature of the pupil, can hardly be considered to-day a matter of great interest.  But French literature was certainly the gainer by the appointment of Bossuet to the post of tutor to the Prince.  Three of his most remarkable works—­his ‘Discourse upon Universal History,’ his ’Policy according to the Holy Writ,’ and his ’Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Man’—­were written especially for the Dauphin, and read by him as textbooks a long time before their publication.  The opening sentence of the ‘Discourse’ tells us clearly the author’s purpose:  “Were history useless to other men, it would still be necessary to have it studied by princes.”

In 1680 Bossuet left the Dauphin, who then married a Bavarian princess, and one year later he was called to the bishopric of Meaux.  Louis XIV. was then taking steps leading to the important and fatal venture by which three years later he repealed the Edict of Nantes, and forbade the existence in France of the Protestant religion.  No one can deny Bossuet’s share in determining the king to follow a policy so fatal to the interests of France, but at the same time so much in accord with the views of Rome.  A natural outcome would have been the raising of Bossuet, who was certainly then the greatest orator, the greatest writer, and the greatest theologian in the Catholic clergy, to the Cardinalate.  Still Bossuet was never a cardinal.