efore the Revolution, were
uncompromising partisans of the four propositions of 1682. Bossuet
was their oracle on every point. One of the most respected of the
directors, M. Boyer, had, while at Rome, a long argument with Pope
Gregory XVI. upon the Gallican propositions. He asserted that the Pope
could not answer his arguments. He detracted, it is true, from the
significance of his success by admitting that no one in Rome took him
_au serieux_, and the residents in the Vatican made sport of him as
being "an antediluvian." It is a pity-that they did not pay more heed
to what he said. A complete change took place about 1840. The older
members whose training dated from before the Revolution were dead,
and the younger ones nearly all rallied to the doctrine of papal
infallibility; but there was, despite of that, a great gulf between
these Ultramontanes of the eleventh hour and the impetuous deriders
of Scholasticism and the Gallican Church who were enrolled under the
banner of Lamennais. St. Sulpice never went so far as they did in
trampling recognised rules under foot.

It cannot be denied that mingled with all this there was a certain
amount of antipathy against talent, and of resentment at interference
with the routine of the schoolmen disturbed in their old-fashioned
doctrines by troublesome innovators. But there was at the same time
a good deal of practical tact in the rules followed by these prudent
directors. They saw the danger of being more royalist than the king,
and they knew how easy was the transition from one extreme to the
other. Men less exempt than they were, from anything like vanity,
would have exulted when Lamennais, the master of these brilliant
paradoxes, who had represented them as being guilty of heresy and
lukewarmness for the Holy See, himself became a heretic, and accused
the Church of Rome of being the tomb of human souls and the mother of
error. Age must not attempt to ape the ways of youth under penalty of
being treated with disrespect.

It is on account of this frankness that St. Sulpice represents all
that is most upright in religion. No attenuation of the dogmas of
Scripture was allowed at St. Sulpice; the fathers, the councils, and
the doctors were looked upon as the sources of Christianity. Proof
of the divinity of Christ was not sought in Mohammed or the battle of
Marengo. These theological buffooneries, which by force of impudence
and eloquence extorted admiration in Notre-Dame, had no