The explanation lies in Bossuet’s conduct in the year 1682.  The King of France in that year called together a General Assembly of the clergy of France, a kind of National Council.  His object was to have the clergy assert its national character, and to state that in civil matters it was subject not to the Pope, but to the King.  The various statements to that effect constitute what is known as ’The Liberties of the Gallican Church.’  The statements were adopted after being drafted by Bossuet, who had at the opening of the sessions delivered before the Assembly his celebrated ‘Sermon on the Unity of the Church,’ the main part of which is an eloquent defense of the above-stated views.  France was too powerful then for the see of Rome not to yield, but no favors were thenceforth to be expected for the spokesman of the French national clergy.

Still the great divine continued his efforts, and in 1688 he put forth the most complete and masterly exposition of his beliefs, his ’History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches.’  The Revolution of 1688-89 in England did not in the least, sad though it seemed, weaken his faith in the ultimate triumph of Catholicism.  In France at that time the English revolution was not considered an assertion by the people of political and religious rights, but the carrying out of a detestable family conspiracy of a daughter and son-in-law with their father’s enemy.  This better than anything else explains the hatred which was harbored against William III., and which found expression in the works even of as free-minded a writer as La Bruyere.  It is during the period of the fiercest struggle between Louis XIV. and William III. that Bossuet carried on with the German philosopher Leibnitz a series of negotiations, the object of which was the return to Catholicism of Protestant Germany.  We need hardly state that the negotiations utterly failed.

In another controversy which occupied Bossuet’s last years he was entirely successful.  The most eloquent of his disciples, Fenelon, then Archbishop of Cambrai, seemed to him to have fallen into dangerous errors.  He had adopted the mystic doctrine of Quietism, which had been made known to him first by an erratic woman, Madame Guyon.  Bossuet determined that the eloquent archbishop must be compelled to recant.  A number of works were published by him in support of his position, the most important one being his ‘Relation on Quietism’; and he did not rest until the Pope had condemned his rival, and Fenelon had submitted to censure in his own cathedral at Cambrai.  Some accuse Bossuet of too much harshness in the contest.  The Pope himself was reported to have said, “The Archbishop of Cambrai sinned by too much love of God, the Bishop of Meaux by too little love of his fellow-man.”

Bossuet was then a very old man, but neither growing age nor the care that he took of what he considered the general interests of Catholic Christianity ever kept him from giving the closest attention to the spiritual government of his flock.  He was a model bishop.  He died April 12th, 1704, aged seventy-six years, six months, and sixteen days.