our kingdom since we abolished therein all exercise of the said religion is a more than sufficient proof that they have embraced the Catholic religion, without which they would have been neither suffered nor tolerated.”  There did not exist, there could not exist, any more Protestants in France; all who died without sacraments were relapsed, and as such dragged on the hurdle.  Those who were not married at a Catholic church were not married.  M. Guizot was born at Nimes on the 4th of October, 1787, before Protestants possessed any civil rights in France.

Bossuet had died on the 12th of April, 1704.  When troubles began again in the church, the enemies of the Jansenists obtained from the king a decree interdicting the Reflexions morales cur le Nouveau Testament, an old and highly esteemed work by Father Quesnel, some time an Oratorian, who had become head of the Jansenists on the death of the great Arnauld.  Its condemnation at Rome was demanded.  Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, had but lately, as Bishop of Chalons, approved of the book; he refused to retract his approbation; the Jesuits made urgent representations to the pope; Clement XI. launched the bull Unigenitus, condemning a hundred and one propositions extracted from the Reflexions morales.  Eight prelates, with Cardinal de Noailles at their head, protested against the bull; it was, nevertheless, enregistered at the Parliament, but not without difficulty.  The archbishop still held out, supported by the greater part of the religious orders and the majority of the doctors of Sorbonne.  The king’s confessor, Letellier, pressed him to prosecute the cardinal and get him deposed by a national council; the affair dragged its slow length along at Rome; the archbishop had suspended from the sacred functions all the Jesuits of his diocese; the struggle had commenced under the name of Jansenism against the whole Gallican church.  The king was about to bring the matter before his bed of justice, when he fell ill.  He saw no more of Cardinal de Noailles, and this rupture vexed him.  “I am sorry to leave the affairs of the church in the state in which they are,” he said to his councillors.  “I am perfectly ignorant in the matter; you know, and I call you to witness, that I have done nothing therein but what you wanted, and that I have done all you wanted.  It is you who will answer before God for all that has been done, whether too much or too little.  I charge you with it before Him, and I have a clear conscience.  I am but a know-nothing who have left myself to your guidance.”  An awful appeal from a dying king to the guides of his conscience.  He had dispeopled his kingdom, reduced to exile, despair, or falsehood fifteen hundred thousand of his subjects, but the memory of the persecutions inflicted upon the Protestants did not trouble him; they were for him rather a pledge of his salvation and of his acceptance before God.  He was thinking of the