the lowest possible point.  The fanaticism of the League, far from serving to make their morality more rigorous, had just the contrary effect.  Priests thought that because they shouldered musket and carbine in the good cause they were at liberty to do as they liked.  The racy humour which prevailed during the reign of Henri IV. was anything but favourable to mysticism.  There was a good side to the outspoken Rabelaisian gaiety which was not deemed, in that day, incompatible with the priestly calling.  In many ways we prefer the bright and witty piety of Pierre Camus, a friend of Francois de Sales, to the rigid and affected attitude which the French clergy has since assumed, and which has converted them into a sort of black army, holding aloof from the rest of the world and at war with it.  But there can be no doubt that about the year 1640 the education of the clergy was not in keeping with the spirit of regularity and moderation which was becoming more and more the law of the age.  From the most opposite directions came a cry for reform.  Francois de Sales admitted that he had not been successful in this attempt, and he told Bourdoise that “after having laboured during seventeen years to train only three such priests as I wanted to assist me in re-forming the clergy of my diocese, I have only succeeded in forming one and-a-half.”  Following upon him came the men of grave and reasonable piety whom I named above.  By means of congregations of a fresh type, distinct from the old monkish rules and in some points copied from the Jesuits, they created the seminary, that is to say the well-walled nursery in which young clerks could be trained and formed.  The transformation was far extending.  The schools of these powerful teachers of the spiritual life turned out a body of men representing the best disciplined, the most orderly, the most national, and it maybe added, the most highly educated clergy ever seen—­a clergy which illustrated the second half of the seventeenth century and the whole of the eighteenth, and the last of whose representatives have only disappeared within the last forty years.  Concurrently with these exertions of orthodox piety arose Port-Royal, which was far superior to St. Sulpice, to St. Lazare, to the Christian doctrine, and even to the Oratoire, as regarded consistency in reasoning and talent in writing, but which lacked the most essential of Catholic virtues, docility.  Port-Royal, like Protestantism, passed through every phase of misfortune.  It was distasteful to the majority, and was always in opposition.  When you have excited the antipathy of your country you are too often led to take a dislike to your country.  The persecuted one is doubly to be pitied, for, in addition to the suffering which he endures, persecution affects him morally; it rarely fails to warp the mind and to shrink the heart.

Olier occupies a place apart in this group of Catholic reformers.  His mysticism is of a kind peculiar to himself.  His Cathechisme chretien pour la Vie interieure, which is scarcely ever read outside St. Sulpice, is a most remarkable book, full of poesy and sombre philosophy, wavering from first to last between Louis de Leon and Spinoza.  Olier’s ideal of the Christian life is what he calls “the state of death.”