original dust, so under the control of the vitalizing, harmonizing principle of liberty and equality, the independent sov ereign states combined together to build up the beautiful fabric of our government; but when the hideous vampire of slavery had sucked the life-blood of the nation, until there was scarcely virtue enough left to resist its impious demands, then the disintegrating elements of state sovereignty, which our fathers repudiated, began to tear to pieces the fair form they had helped to create. And so far had the work of disintegration gone, that the head of this great nation was forced, by the traitors in the cabinet, to declare, in his official capacity, that the government had no power "to coerce a state into obedience to its authority;" that this young republic, for which all history has been a preparation, with its work before it scarcely begun, had not vitality enough to save it from falling to pieces. So completely had the piratical crew dismantled the ship of state, that, amid the howling of the storm, the man at the helm was heard, in whining tones, proclaiming that there was not strength enough left in the "old hulk" to hold its planks together. No wonder that the stoutest hearts quailed before the dangers of that dark hour, and patriots gazed with mute despair into the threatening gloom of the future! But God did not mean to destroy us. Even in the last extremity deliverance came. The pirates, who were madly driving us on the breakers, were hurled overboard, and now, with a loyal crew and a firm, unflinching hand at the helm, the old ship has righted; and as she gallantly rides the heaving billows, the sun-light breaks through the rifts in the thunder-cloud, with the assurance that she will yet weather the storm, and bring her rich freight of human hopes safe into port at last! God means to save us; but he means to try us by fire. All that is ruthless and wicked in us will be burned up, but all that is worth saving in us will only be purer and better for the fierce ordeal. God intends to make us fit for the work he put us here to do; and to make us willing to do it. As the duty is noble to which we are called, so the chastisement that is to prepare us for it is severe; nor will it end until our repentance is thorough. But already the nation, from the depths of its humility, is looking anxiously toward Heaven FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVIII.-2 050 M59 inquiring, "What must we do to be saved?" Already the paralyzed and deadened national heart begins to show signs of life; and the first effort of its returning vitality is to throw off this virus of slavery, and bring itself into sympathy with the great living heart of humanity. Already we have learned that devotion to the principles of truth and justice is worth more than "all the wealth that sinews bought and sold have ever earned," and as we begin to fall in with the grand, everflowing current of God's providence, cheering signs of promise are given to us; "While down the happy Future runs a flood Of prophesying light: It shows an Earth no longer stain'd with blood; ART. II.-BOSSUET AS A PERSECUTOR. AMONG the eminent men who have graced the pulpit of Roman Catholic France, there is none whose name is better known, outside of his own Church, as well as within it, than Jaques Bénigne Bossuet. This rare distinction is not the result of accident. The acute intellect, which revealed its great capacities to the instructors of his youth, and induced the Jesuit. fathers of Dijon to make strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to gain him for their order, was allied to oratorical powers of the very first rank. As a boy, he was distinguished for his assi duity and proficiency; and in the college of Navarre, where he pursued his studies for the priesthood, he was recognized as the most promising scholar of his day. Undoubtedly the influence of the ancient and respectable Burgundian family from which he sprang, had something to do with his early advancement; but it was the beauty of his style that delighted the literary men of his times; it was the grace of his delivery that rendered him a favorite with the despotic monarch of France and his courtiers; it was the elegance and force of his address that entranced the multitudes who followed him around from church to church in the metropolis. Thus everything conspired to promote his elevation. Within the space of a few years, from being a simple canon of the cathedral of Metz, we find him appointed to preach lenten sermons before Louis the Fourteenth, next nominated to the bishopric of Condom, then selected to be preceptor to the dauphin, and finally settled in the episcopal see of Meaux, in the immediate vicinity of Paris, to be called frequently to assist the king by his counsels. Whatever may be thought at the present day of the merits of his Universal History, it will be conceded by all that he was peculiarly adapted to the part which he so frequently assumed as a controversialist. From his dispute with Fénélon he came off with the appearance of victory; and among all the champions of the Roman Catholic side there was no one but Bossuet who could make even a respectable opposition to the surpassing cloquence of the great Claude. No one knew how to present an argument in a more specious guise; and his printed works bear as unmistakable testimony to this, as the traditions of his skillful evasions in oral controversies. His "History of the Variations of the Protestants" is even now a favorite weapon in the hands of the advocates of the Roman Church, and more than one really critical mind, to say nothing of the multitudes who are ever easy dupes of ingenious fallacies, has been attracted by it, for a time at least, to the pretended Mother Church as that in which alone true unity can be found. By no writer have the inconsistencies of doctrine of the representative men of the various Protestant Churches, and their contests with one another, and deplorable want of charity for the supposed errors of brethren with whom they nevertheless agree in the essential points of the Christian faith, been employed more effectively to exhibit the perils attending individual and independent inquiry, in contrast with the safety of the adherents of ecclesiastical tradition. But it is neither with Bossuet as the debater and writer on points of theological controversy, nor yet with Bossuet as representative of the Gallican Church and defender of its liberties against the usurpations of the papal see, in the famous declaration of the French clergy in 1682, that we have here to do. It is rather Bossuet in his diocese, Bossuet as Bishop of Meaux, in his relations to the poor Huguenots, whom we propose to consider in the light which history has recently thrown upon his course from the time of his enthronization to within a year or two of his death. The period which comprises the active career of Bossuet is one of the most remarkable in French history; and, as it has since appeared, one of the most disastrous in its consequences. The latter half of the sixteenth century had witnessed a series of civil wars, with intermissions that could be viewed as little better than truces, (since they were mainly spent by both parties in the recuperation of their wasted strength,) which had carried devastation and ruin into every province of the kingdom. The century had closed after the proclamation of an edict of toleration, on the basis of which, had it been adopted forty years earlier, all the commotions and bloodshed of the intervening period might easily have been precluded. The Edict of Nantes, intended by the sagacious Henry IV. as a perpetual and fundamental law, secured to Protestantism in France, not equality in the enjoyment of the rights of the profession of their faith and of worship with Roman Catholics, but a toleration sufficiently broad to prevent the repetition of those horrid butcheries which disgraced the French name in the age of the Reformation, and the liberty to perform their solemnities in those places in the neighborhood of which they constituted an important element of the population. But the seventeenth century presents us the familiar story of the gradual infringement upon privileges, whose direct abrogation is avoided for the time as impracticable, and is delayed until everything is ripe for the long-anticipated catastrophe. Slowly but surely the Protestants are deprived of their rights as French citizens. Their worship is restricted to a smaller number of places. They are excluded from places of trust and emolument; they are looked upon by the government with an unfriendly eye; they can hope for no preferment in the civil or military service of the monarch, even after renewed demonstrations of their loyalty have been afforded. Every facility is furnished to those who would enter their midst to seduce them from their devotion to the Church of their fathers. Upon the slightest pretexts their children are torn away from their firesides, and they themselves subjected to the penalties of apostasy. It was a course of gradual disenfranchisement, which was not complete until within fifteen years of the close of the century. Meanwhile the law could scarcely keep pace with the successive steps of this ingenious persecution. Edict rapidly followed edict, the whole constituting a voluminous and cumbrous legislation-a hundred-headed monster that should at every point confront the adherents of the "religion prétendue réformée," as it was contemptuously styled, and weary out their constancy of purpose. The device of enforcing conversion by quartering a rude and insolent soldiery upon a peaceable portion of the population, and conniving at its most flagrant crimes, proved successful in many cases where the inducements held out to tempt ambition and the love of wealth had been found ineffectual. The results were magnified by the cunning projectors of these enterprises, while the means employed were as much as possible screened from view; until at length the French king was brought to believe that the plans of his advisers had been crowned with such entire success, that the conversion of the Huguenots, which had been too difficult a problem for his predecessors, had actually been accomplished, constituting the most glorious achievement of his reign. The very preamble of the edict of revocation, which consigned to expatriation the most industrious part of the French nation, numbering, according to one account, eight hundred thousand souls, bases this action upon the uselessness of retaining the Edict of Nantes in force, the royal exertions having accomplished what they had proposed, and "the greater part of our subjects of the said pretended Reformed religion having embraced the Catholic religion !" It was while the Protestants of France were thus being stripped of one right after another, and about four years previous to the final blow, that Bossuet was, in 1681, installed as bishop of Meaux. He was, therefore, of necessity, involved to some extent in relation to the work which the court had undertaken. The city of Meaux was one of the capital points of the reformation in France. It was among the wool-carders of Meaux that the Gospel achieved its first victories under the temporary protection of Briçonnet, the vacillating prelate. At Meaux Jean Leclerc was the first to suffer the perforation of his tongue with hot iron and branding on the forehead, for the boldness with which he tore down a papal bull, and sub |