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XI.

THE GENTLEMEN OF PORT-ROYAL.*

§ 1. In the sixteen-hundreds by far the most successful schoolmasters were the Jesuits. In spite of their exclusion from the University, they had in the Province of Paris some 14,000 pupils, and in Paris itself at the Collège de Clermont, 1,800. Might they not have neglected "the Little Schools," which were organized by the friends and disciples of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, schools in which the numbers were always small, about twenty or twenty-five, and only once increasing to fifty? And yet the Jesuits left no stone unturned, no weapon unemployed, in their attack on "the Little Schools." The conflict seems to us like an engagement between a man-of-war and a fishing-boat. That the poor fishing-boat would soon be beneath the waves, was clear enough from the beginning, and she did indeed speedily disappear; but the victors have never recovered from their victory and never will. Whenever we think of Jesuitism we are not more forcibly reminded of Loyola than of Pascal. All educated Frenchmen, most educated people everywhere, get their best remembered impressions of the Society of Loyola from the Provincial Letters.†

* For full titles of the books referred to see p. 195.

The solitaries of Port-Royal used to vary their mental toil with manual. A Jesuit having maliciously asked whether it was true that

The Jesuits and the Arnaulds.

§ 2. The Society had a long standing rivalry with the University of Paris, and the University not only refused to admit the Jesuits, but several times petitioned the Parliament to chase them out of France. On one of these occasions the advocate who was retained by the University was Antoine Arnauld, a man of renowned eloquence; and he threw himself into the attack with all his heart. From that time the Jesuits had a standing feud with the house of Arnauld.

§ 3. But it was no mere personal dislike that separated the Port-Royalists and the Jesuits. Port-Royal with which the Arnauld family was so closely united, became the stronghold of a theology which was unlike that of the Jesuits, and was denounced by them as heresy. The daughter of Antoine Arnauld was made, at the age of eleven years, Abbess of Port-Royal, a Cistercian convent not far from Versailles. This position was obtained for her by a fraud of Marion, Henry IV's advocate-general, who thought only of providing comfortably for one of the twenty children to whom his daughter, Made. Arnauld, had made him grandfather. Never was a nomination more scandalously obtained or used to better purpose. The Mère Angélique is one of the saints of the universal church, and she soon became the restorer of the religious life first in her own and then by her influence and example in other convents of her Order.

§ 4. In these reforms she had nothing to fear from her hereditary foes the Jesuits; but she soon came under the influence of a man whose theory of life was as much opposed

Monsieur Pascal made shoes, met with the awkward repartee, "Je ne sais pas s'il fait des souliers, mais je crois qu'il vous a porté une fameuse botte."

Saint-Cyran and Port-Royal.

to the Jesuits' theory as to that of the world which found in the Jesuits the most accommodating father confessors.

Duvergier de Hauranne (1581-1643) better known by the name of his "abbaye," Saint-Cyran, was one of those commanding spirits who seem born to direct others and form a distinct society. In vain Richelieu offered him the posts most likely to tempt him. The prize that Saint-Cyran had set his heart upon was not of this world, and Richelieu could assist him in one way only-by persecution. This assistance the Cardinal readily granted, and by his orders Saint-Cyran was imprisoned at Vincennes, and not set at liberty till Richelieu was himself summoned before a higher tribunal.

§ 5. Driven by prevailing sickness from Port-Royal des Champs, the Mère Angélique transported her community (in 1626) to a house purchased for them in Paris by her mother who in her widowhood became one of the Sisters. In Paris Angélique sought for herself and her convent the spiritual direction of Saint-Cyran (not yet a prisoner), and from that time Saint-Cyran added the Abbess and Sisters of Port-Royal to the number of those who looked up to him as their pattern and guide in all things.

Port-Royal des Champs was in course of time occupied by a band of solitaries who at the bidding of Saint-Cyran renounced the world and devoted themselves to prayer and study. To them we owe the works of "the Gentlemen of Port-Royal."

§ 6. It is then to Saint-Cyran we must look for the ideas which became the distinctive mark of the Port Royalists.

Saint-Cyran was before all things a theologian. In his early days at Bayonne his studies had been shared by a

Saint-Cyran an "Evangelical."

friend who afterwards was professor of theology at Louvain, and then Bishop of Ypres. This friend was Jansenius. Their searches after truth had brought them to opinions. which in the England of the nineteenth century are known as "Evangelical." According to "Catholic" teaching all those who receive the creed and the sacraments of the Church and do not commit "mortal" sin are in a "state of salvation," that is to say the great majority of Christians are saved. This teaching is rejected by those of another school of thought who hold that only a few "elect" are saved and that the great body even of Christians are doomed to perdition.

§ 7. Such a belief as this would seem to be associated of necessity with harshness and gloom; but from whatever cause, there has been found in many, even in most, cases no such connexion. Those who have held that the great mass of their fellow-creatures had no hope in a future world, have thrown themselves lovingly into all attempts to improve their condition in this world. Still, their main effort has always been to increase the number of the converted and to preserve them from the wiles of the enemy. This SaintCyran sought to do by selecting a few children and bringing them up in their tender years like hot-house plants, in the hope that they would be prepared when older and stronger, to resist the evil influences of the world.

§ 8. His first plan was to choose out of all Paris six children and to confide them to the care of a priest appointed to direct their consciences, and a tutor of not more than twenty-five years old, to teach them Latin. "I should think," says he, "it was doing a good deal if I did not advance them far in Latin before the age of twelve, and made them pass their first years confined to one house or a

Short career of the Little Schools.

monastery in the country where they might be allowed all the pastimes suited to their age and where they might see only the example of a good life set by those about them." (Letter quoted by Carré, p. 20.)

§ 9. His imprisonment put a stop to this plan, “but," says Saint-Cyran, "I do not lightly break off what I undertake for God;" so when intrusted with the disposal of 2,000 francs by M. Bignon, he started the first "Little School," in which two small sons of M. Bignon's were taken as pupils. The name of "Little Schools," was given partly perhaps because according to their design the numbers in any school could never be large, partly no doubt to deprecate any suspicion of rivalry with the schools of the University. The children were to be taken at an early age, nine or ten, before they could have any guilty knowledge of evil, and SaintCyran made in all cases a stipulation that at any time a child might be returned to his friends; but in cases where the master's care seemed successful, the pupils were to be kept under it till they were grown up.

§ 10. The Little Schools had a short and troubled career of hardly more than fifteen years. They were not fully organized till 1646; they were proscribed a few years later and in 1661 were finally broken up by Louis XIV, who was under the influence of their enemies the Jesuits. But in that time the Gentlemen of Port-Royal had introduced new ideas which have been a force in French education and indeed in all literary education ever since.

To Saint-Cyran then we trace the attempt at a particular kind of school, and to his followers some new departures in the training of the intellect.

§ 11. Basing his system on the Fall of Man, Saint-Cyran came to a conclusion which was also reached by Locke

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