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PREFACES.

Editor's Preface

Author's Preface

Memoir

ON DIRECTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Religious Re-action in 1600--Influence of the Jesuits over Women and Children--Savoy; the Vaudois; Violence and Gentleness--St. Fran?ois de Sales

St. Fran?ois de Sales and Madame de Chantal--Visitation--Quietism--Results of Religious Direction

Loneliness of Woman--Easy Devotion--Worldly Theology of the Jesuits--Women and Children advantageously made use of--Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648--Gallant Devotion--Religious Novels--Casuists

Convents--Convents in Paris--Convents contrasted; the Director--Dispute about the Direction of the Nuns--The Jesuits Triumph through Calumny

Re-action of Morality--Arnaud, 1643; Pascal, 1657--The Jesuits lose Ground--They gain over the King and the Pope--Discouragement of the Jesuits; their Corruption--They Protect the Quietists--Desmarets--Morin burnt, 1663--Immorality of Quietism

Apparition of Molinos, 1675--His Success at Rome--French Quietists--Madame Guyon and her Director--"The Torrents"--Mystic Death--Do we return from it?

Fenelon as Director--His Quietism--"Maxims of Saints," 1697--Fenelon and Madame de la Maisonfort

Bossuet as Director--Bossuet and Sister Cornuau--Bossuet's Imprudence--He is a Quietist in Practice--Devout Direction inclines to Quietism--Moral Paralysis

Molinos' "Guide"--Part Played in it by the Director; Hypocritical Austerity--Immoral Doctrine; Approved by Rome, 1675--Molinos Condemned at Rome, 1687--His Morals--His Morals Conformable to his Doctrine--Spanish Molinosists--Mother Agueda

No more Systems: an Emblem--The Heart--Sex--The Immaculate--The Sacred Heart--Mario Alacoque--The Seventeenth Century is the Age of Equivocation--Chimerical Politics of the Jesuits--Father Colombi?re--England--Papist Conspiracy--First Altar of the Sacred Heart--The Ruin of the Galileans, Quietists, and Port-Royal--Theology annihilated in the Eighteenth Century--Materiality of the Sacred Heart--Jesuitical Art

ON DIRECTION IN GENERAL, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Resemblances and Differences between the seventeenth and nineteenth Centuries--Christian Art--It is we who have restored the Church--What the Church adds to the Power of the Priest--The Confessional

Confession--Present Education of the Young Confessor--The Priest in the Middle Ages--1st, believed--2ndly, was mortified--3rdly, knew--4thly, interrogated less--The Dangers of the Young Confessor--How he Strengthens his Tottering Position

Confession--The Confessor and the Husband--How they Detach the Wife--The Director--Directors in Concert--Ecclesiastical Policy

Habit--Power of Habit--Its Insensible Beginning; its Progress--Second Nature; often fatal--A Man taking Advantage of his Power--Can we get clear of it?

On Convents--Omnipotence of the Director--Condition of the Nuns, Forlorn and Wretched--Convents made Bridewells and Bedlams--Captation--Barbarous Discipline; Struggle between the Superior Nun and the Director; Change of Directors--The Magistrate

Desire. Terrors of the other World--The Physician and his Patient--Alternatives; Postponements--Effects of Fear in Love--To be All-powerful and Abstain--Struggles between the Spirit and the Flesh--Moral Death more Potent than Physical Life--It will not revive

Schism in Families--The Daughter; by whom Educated--Importance of Education--The Advantage of the First Instructor--Influence of Priests upon Marriage--Which they Retain after that Ceremony

The Mother--Alone for a Long Time, she can bring up her Child--Intellectual Nourishment--Gestation, Incubation, Education--The Child Guarantees the Mother, and she the Child--She protects his Originality, which Public Education must Limit--The Father even Limits it, the Mother Defends it--Her Weakness; she wishes her Son to be a Hero--Her Heroic Disinterestedness

PRIESTS, WOMEN, AND FAMILIES.

ON DIRECTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

RELIGIOUS REACTION IN 1600.--INFLUENCE OF THE JESUITS OVER WOMEN AND CHILDREN.--SAVOY; THE VAUDOIS; VIOLENCE AND MILDNESS.--ST. FRANCOIS DE SALES.

If the painter was inspired by anything else, it was not by the Gospel, but rather by the devout novels of that period, or the fashionable sermons uttered by the Jesuits in their coquettish-looking churches. The Angelic Salutation, the Visitation, the Annunciation, were the darling subjects upon which they had, for a long time past, exhausted every imagination of seraphic gallantry. On beholding this picture by Guide, we fancy we are reading the Bernardino. The angel speaks Latin like a young learned clerk; the Virgin, like a boarding-school young lady, responds in soft Italian, "O alto signore," &c.

This pretty picture is important as a work characteristic of an already corrupt age; being an agreeable and delicate work, we are the more easily led to perceive its suspicious graces and equivocal charms.

The Jesuits could plead that, being the constrained restorers of Papal authority, that is to say, physicians to a dead body, the means were not left to their choice. Dead beat in the world of ideas, where could they hope to resume their warfare, save in the field of intrigue, passion, and human weaknesses?

There, nobody could serve them more actively than Women. Even when they did not act with the Jesuits and for them, they were not less useful in an indirect manner, as instruments and means,--as objects of business and daily compromise between the penitent and the confessor.

In this great enterprise of kidnapping man everywhere, by using woman as a decoy, and by woman getting possession of the child, the Jesuits met with more than one obstacle, but one particularly serious--their reputation of Jesuits. They were already by far too well known. We may read in the letters of St. Charles Borromeo, who had established them at Milan and singularly favoured them, what sort of character he gives them--intriguing, quarrelsome, and insolent under a cringing exterior. Even their penitents, who found them very convenient, were nevertheless at times disgusted with them. The most simple saw plainly enough that these people, who found every opinion probable, had none themselves. These famous champions of the faith were sceptics in morals: even less than sceptics, for speculative scepticism might leave some sentiment of honour; but a doubter in practice, who says Yes on such and such an act, and Yes on the contrary one, must sink lower and lower in morality, and lose not only every principle, but in time every affection of the heart!

Their very appearance was a satire against them. These people, so cunning in disguising themselves, were made up of lying; it was everywhere around them, palpable and visible. Like brass badly gilt, like the holy toys in their gaudy churches, they appeared false at the distance of a hundred paces: false in expression, accent, gesture, and attitude; affected, exaggerated, and often excessively fickle. This inconstancy was amusing, but it also put people on their guard. They could well learn an attitude or a deportment; but studied graces, and a bending, undulating, and serpentine gait are anything but satisfactory. They worked hard to appear a simple, humble, insignificant, good sort of people. Their grimace betrayed them.

These equivocal-looking individuals had, however, in the eyes of the women a redeeming quality: they were passionately fond of children. No mother, grandmother, or nurse could caress them more, or could find better some endearing word to make them smile. In the churches of the Jesuits the good saints of the order, St. Xavier or St. Ignatius, are often painted as grotesque nurses, holding the divine darling in their arms, fondling and kissing it. They began also to make on their altars and in their fantastically-ornamented chapels those little paradises in glass cases, where women are delighted to see the wax child among flowers. The Jesuits loved children so much, that they would have liked to educate them all.

Not one of them, however learned he might be, disdained to be a tutor, to give the principles of grammar, and teach the declensions.

There were, however, many people among their own friends and penitents, even those who trusted their souls to their keeping, who, nevertheless, hesitated to confide their sons to them. They would have succeeded far less with women and children, if their good fortune had not given them for ally a tall lad, shrewd and discreet, who possessed precisely what they had lacked to inspire confidence,--a charming simplicity.

This friend of the Jesuits, who served them so much the better as he did not become one of them, invented, in an artless manner, for the profit of these intriguers, the manner, tone, and true style of easy devotion, which they would have ever sought for in vain. Falsehood would never assume the shadow of reality as it can do, if it was always and entirely unconnected with truth.

Before speaking of Fran?ois de Sales, I must say one word about the stage on which he performs his part.

The great effort of the Ultramontane reaction about the year 1600 was at the Alps, in Switzerland and Savoy. The work was going on bravely on each side of the mountains, only the means were far from being the same: they showed on either side a totally different countenance--here the face of an angel, there the look of a wild beast; the latter physiognomy was against the poor Vaudois in Piedmont.

In Savoy, and towards Geneva, they put on the angelic expression, not being able to employ any other than gentle means against populations sheltered by treaties, and who would have been protected against violence by the lances of Switzerland.

The agent of Rome in this quarter was the celebrated Jesuit, Antonio Possevino, a professor, scholar, and diplomatist, as well as the confessor of the kings of the North. He himself organised the persecutions against the Vaudois of Piedmont; and he formed and directed his pupil, Fran?ois de Sales, to gain by his address the Protestants of Savoy.

Ought I to speak of this terrible history of the Vaudois, or pass it over in silence? Speak of it! It is far too cruel--no one will relate it without his pen hesitating, and his words being blotted by his tears. If, however, I did not speak of it, we should never behold the most odious part of the system, that artful policy which employed the very opposite means in precisely the same cases; here ferocity, there an unnatural mildness. One word, and I leave the sad story. The most implacable butchers were women, the penitents of the Jesuits of Turin. The victims were children! They destroyed them in the sixteenth century: there were four hundred children burnt at one time in a cavern. In the seventeenth century they kidnapped them. The edict of pacification, granted to the Vaudois in 1655, promises, as a singular favour, that their children under twelve years of age shall no longer be stolen from them; above that age it is still lawful to seize them.

This new sort of persecution, more cruel than massacres, characterises the period when the Jesuits undertook to make themselves universally masters of the education of children. These pitiless plagiarists, who dragged them away from their mothers, wanted only to bring them up in their fashion, make them abjure their faith, hate their family, and arm them against their brethren.

It was, as I have said, a Jesuit professor, Possevino, who renewed the persecution about the time at which we are now arrived. The same, while teaching at Padua, had for his pupil young Fran?ois de Sales, who had already passed a year in Paris, at the college of Clermont. He belonged to one of those families of Savoy, as much distinguished by their devotion as by their valour, who carried on wars long against Geneva. He was endowed with all the qualities requisite for the war of seduction, which they then desired to commence--a gentle and sincere devotion, a lively and earnest speech, and a singular charm of goodness, beauty, and gentleness. Who has not remarked this charm in the smile of the children of Savoy, who are so natural, yet so circumspect?

Every favour of Heaven must, we certainly believe, have been showered upon him, since in this bad age, bad taste, and bad party, among the cunning and false people who made him their tool, he remained, however, St. Fran?ois de Sales. Everything he has said or written, without being free from blemishes, is charming, full of affection, of an original gentleness and genius, which, though it may excite a smile, is nevertheless very affecting. Everywhere we find, as it were, living fountains springing up, flowers after flowers, and rivulets meandering as in a lovely spring morning after a shower. It might be said, perhaps, that he amuses himself so much with flowerets, that his nosegay is no longer such as shepherdesses gather, but such as would suit a flower-girl, as his Philothea would say: he takes them all, and takes too many; there are some colours among them badly matched, and have a strange effect. It is the taste of that age, we must confess; the Savoyard taste in particular does not fear ugliness; and a Jesuit education does not lead to the detestation of falsehood.

But even if he had not been so charming a writer, his bewitching personal qualities would still have had the same effect. His fair mild countenance, with rather a childish expression, pleased at first sight. Little children, in their nurses' arms, as soon as they saw him, could not take their eyes off him. He was equally delighted with them, and would exclaim, as he fondly caressed them, "Here is my little family." The children ran after him, and the mothers followed their children.

Little family? or little intrigue? The words are somewhat similar; and though a child in appearance, the good man was at bottom very deep. If he permitted the nuns a few trifling falsehoods, ought we to believe he never granted the same indulgence to himself? However it may be, actual falsehood appeared less in his words than in his position; he was made a bishop in order to give the example of sacrificing the rights of the bishops to the Pope. For the love of peace, and to hide the division of the Catholics by an appearance of union, he did the Jesuits the important service of saving their Molina accused at Rome; and he managed to induce the Pope to impose silence on the friends, as well as the enemies, of Grace.

This sweet-tempered man did not, however, confine himself to the means of mildness and persuasion. In his zeal as a converter, he invoked the assistance of less honourable means--interest, money, places; lastly, authority and terror. He made the Duke of Savoy travel from village to village, and advised him at last to drive away the remaining few who still refused to abjure their faith. Money, very powerful in this poor country, seemed to him a means at once so natural and irresistible, that he went even into Geneva, to buy up old Theodore de B?ze, and offered him, on the part of the Pope, a pension of four thousand crowns.

The masterpiece of the Jesuit was to get the shepherd-poet Des Yveteaux, the most empty-headed man in France, named tutor, reserving to himself the moral and religious part of education.

See his Life, by Dorigny, p. 505.; Bonneville, Life of St. Fran?ois, p. 19, &c.

Read the three great Vaudois historians, Gilles, L?ger, and Arnaud.

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