y. Since then
they had tried Quietism: at one time they let Fenelon believe they
would support him. But as soon as Louis XIV. had declared himself,
"they ducked like divers," preached against their friend, and
discovered forty errors in the _Maxims of Saints_.

They had never well succeeded as theologians. Silence suited them
better than all their systems. They had got it imposed by the pope
upon the Dominicans, in the very beginning of the century, and
afterwards upon the Jansenists. Since then their affairs went on
better. It was precisely at the time they ceased writing, that they
obtained for the sick king the power of disposing of benefices (1687),
and thus, to the great surprise of the Gallicans, who had thought them
conquered, they became the kings of the clergy of France.

Now, no more ideas, no more systems; they had grown tired of them.
Long ago we mentioned the prevailing lassitude. Besides, there is, we
must confess, in the long lives of men, states, and religions; there
is, I say, a time when, having run from project to project, and from
dream to dream, every idea is hated. In these profoundly material
moments, everything is rejected that is not tangible. Do people then
become positive? No. But they do not return any more to the poetical
symbols which in their youth they had adored. The old doter, in his
second childhood, makes for himself some idol, some palpable, tangible
god, and the coarser it is, the better he succeeds.

This explains the prodigious success with which the Jesuits in this age
of lassitude spread, and caused to be accepted, a new object of
worship, both very carnal and very material--the Heart of Jesus, either
shown through the wound in His partly opened breast, or as plucked out
and bloody.

Nearly the same thing had happened in the decrepitude of paganism.
Religion had taken refuge in the sacrifice of bulls, the sanguinary
Mithraic expiation--the worship of blood.

At the grand festival of the _Sacred Heart_ which the Jesuits gave in
the last century, in the Coliseum of Rome, they struck a medal with
this motto, worthy of the solemnity, "He gave Himself to the people to
eat, in the amphitheatre of Titus:"[1] instead of a system, it was an
emblem, a dumb sign. What triumph for the friends of obscurity and
equivocation! no equivocation of language can equal a material object,
which may be interpreted in a thousand ways, for rendering ideas
undecided and confused. The