before a Council at Embrun to answer a charge of resistance to the
far-famed Bull "Unigenitus," and so strong were his convictions and so
great his loyalty to his conscience, that he resisted the Council as
well as the Bull, and was deprived of his See as a Jansenist and
recalcitrant, and exiled to the Abbey of La-Chaise-Dieu. In quiet Senez
there must always have been time for reflection, and one can imagine the
bitter struggle of this brave man as he walked the rooms of the Palace,
as he crossed and re-crossed the small square to the Cathedral. One can
imagine his wrestling with God and his conscience every time that he
celebrated a Mass for the people before the Cathedral's altar. One can
understand the bitter fight between two high ideals, irreconcilable in
his life,--that of work in God's vineyard or of doctrinal purity as he
saw it. He had to choose between them, this Bishop of Senez, and when he
left the town to answer the summons of the Council at Embrun, his heart
must have been sore within him, he must have said farewell to many
things. Few decisions can be more serious than the renunciation of
family and home for the service of God, few more solemn than the
struggles between the flesh and the spirit; but no more pathetic picture
can exist than that sad figure of Jean Soannen; for he had renounced
family and the world, and for the sake of "accepted truth" which was
false to him, endured helpless, solitary insignificance under the
espionage of suspicious and unfriendly monks. The traveller remembered
his tomb, that tomb in a small chapel near the foot of the stair-case in
the famous Abbey far-away, and sighing, hoped that in his mournful
exile, the Bishop may have realised that "they also serve who only stand
and wait."

The Bull Unigenitus, which caused his downfall, is believed to have
caused, during the last years of Louis XIV's bigotry, the persecution of
thirty thousand respectable, intelligent, and orderly Frenchmen. De
Noailles, several Bishops, and the Parliament of Paris refused to accept
it, though they stopped short of open rebellion, and even Fenelon
"submitted" rather than acceded to it. This famous and vexatious
document was an unhappy emanation of Pope Clement XIII. Hard pressed by
his faithful supporters, the Jesuits, he promulgated it in 1713, and it
condemns with great explicitness one hundred and one propositions which
are taken from Quesnel's Jansenistic "Reflexions morales sur le Nouveau
Te