hard work; fellow-students nicknamed him Bos suetus aratro—an ox broken in to the plough. But his abilities became known beyond the college walls. He was taken up by the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a great centre of aristocratic culture and the original home of the Précieuses. Here he became the subject of a celebrated experiment. A dispute having arisen about extempore preaching, the boy of sixteen was put up, late one night, to deliver an impromptu discourse. He acquitted himself as well as in more conventional examinations. In 1652 he took a brilliant degree in divinity, and was ordained priest. The next seven years he spent at Metz, where his father’s influence had got him a canonry at the early age of thirteen; to this was now added the more important office of archdeacon. He was plunged at once into the thick of controversy; for nearly half Metz was Protestant, and Bossuet’s first appearance in print was a refutation of the Huguenot pastor Paul Ferry (1655). To reconcile the Protestants with the Roman Church became the great object of his dreams; and for this purpose he began to train himself carefully for the pulpit, an all-important centre of influence in a land where political assemblies were unknown, and novels and newspapers scarcely born. Not that he reached perfection at a bound. His youthful imagination was unbridled, and his ideas ran easily into a kind of paradoxical subtlety, redolent of the divinity school. But these blemishes vanished when he settled in Paris (1659), and three years later mounted the pulpit of the Chapel Royal.
In Paris the congregations had no mercy on purely clerical logic or clerical taste; if a preacher wished to catch their ear, he must manage to address them in terms they would agree to consider sensible and well-bred. Not that Bossuet thought too much of their good opinion. Having very stern ideas of the dignity of a priest, he refused to descend to the usual devices for arousing popular interest. The narrative element in his sermons grows shorter with each year. He never drew satirical pictures, like his great rival Bourdaloue. He would not write out his discourses in full, much less learn them off by heart: of the two hundred printed in his Works all but a fraction are rough drafts. No wonder ladies like Mme de Sévigné forsook him, when Bourdaloue dawned on the Paris horizon in 1669; though Fénelon and La Bruyère, two much sounder critics, refused to follow their example. Bossuet possessed the full equipment of the orator, voice, language, flexibility and strength. He never needed to strain for effect; his genius struck out at a single blow the thought, the feeling and the word. What he said of Martin Luther applies peculiarly to himself: he could “fling his fury into theses,” and thus unite the dry light of argument with the fire and heat of passion. These qualities reach their highest point in the Oraisons funèbres. Bossuet was always best when at work on a large canvas; besides, here no conscientious scruples intervened to prevent him giving much time and thought to the artistic side of his subject. For the Oraison, as its name betokened, stood midway between the sermon proper and what would nowadays be called a biographical sketch. At least, that was what Bossuet made it; for on this field he stood not merely first, but alone. His three great masterpieces were delivered at the funerals of Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I. (1669), her daughter, Henrietta, duchess of Orleans (1670), and the great soldier Condé (1687).
Apart from these state occasions, Bossuet seldom appeared in a Paris pulpit after 1669. In that year he was gazetted bishop of Condom in Gascony, though he resigned the charge on being appointed tutor to the dauphin, only child of Louis XIV., and now a boy of nine (1670). The choice was scarcely fortunate. Bossuet unbent as far as he could, but his genius was by no means fitted to enter into the feelings of a child; and the dauphin was a cross, ungainly, sullen lad, who grew up to be a merely genealogical incident at his father’s court. Probably no one was happier than the tutor, when his charge’s sixteenth birthday came round, and he was promptly married off to a Bavarian princess. Still the nine years at court were by no means wasted. Hitherto Bossuet had published nothing, except his answer to Ferry. Now he sat down to write for his pupil’s instruction—or rather, to fit himself to give that instruction—a remarkable trilogy. First came the Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même, then the Discours sur l’histoire universelle, lastly the Politique tirée de l’Écriture Sainte. The three books fit into each other. The Traité is a general sketch of the nature of God and the nature of man. The Discours is a history of God’s dealings with humanity in the past. The Politique is a code of rights and duties drawn up in the light thrown by those dealings. Not that Bossuet literally supposed that the last word of political wisdom had been said by the Old Testament. His conclusions are only “drawn from Holy Scripture,” because he wished to gain the highest possible sanction for the institutions of his country—to hallow the France of Louis XIV. by proving its astonishing likeness to the Israel of Solomon. Then, too, the veil of Holy Scripture enabled him to speak out more boldly than court-etiquette would have otherwise allowed, to remind the son of Louis XIV. that kings have duties as well as rights. Louis had often forgotten these duties, but Louis’ son would bear them in mind. The tutor’s imagination looked forward to a time when France would blossom into Utopia, with a Christian philosopher on the throne. That is what made him so stalwart a champion of authority in all its forms: “le roi, Jésus-Christ et l’Église, Dieu en ces trois noms”, he says in a characteristic letter. And the object of his books is to provide authority with a rational basis. For Bossuet’s worship of authority by no means killed his confidence in reason; what it did was to make him doubt the honesty of those who reasoned otherwise than himself. The whole chain of argument seemed to him so clear and simple. Philosophy proved that a God exists, and that He shapes and governs the course of human affairs. History showed that this governance is, for the most part, indirect, exercised through certain venerable corporations, as well civil as ecclesiastical, all of which demand implicit obedience as the immediate representatives of God. Thus all revolt, whether civil or religious, is a direct defiance of the Almighty. Cromwell becomes a moral monster, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes is “the greatest achievement of the second Constantine.” Not that Bossuet glorified the status quo simply as a clerical bigot. The France of his youth had known the misery of divided counsels and civil war; the France of his manhood, brought together under an absolute sovereign, had suddenly shot up into a splendour only comparable with ancient Rome. Why not, then, strain every nerve to hold innovation at bay and prolong that splendour for all time? Bossuet’s own Discours sur l’histoire universelle might have furnished an answer, for there the fall of many empires is detailed. But then the Discours was composed under a single preoccupation. To Bossuet the establishment of Christianity was the one point of real importance in the whole history of the world. Over Mahomet and the East he passed without a word; on Greece and Rome he only touched in so far as they formed part of the Praeparatio Evangelica. And yet his Discours is far more than a theological pamphlet. Pascal, in utter scorn for science, might refer the rise and fall of empires to Providence or chance—the nose of Cleopatra, or “a little grain of sand” in the English lord protector’s veins. Bossuet held fast to his principle that God works through secondary causes. “It is His will that every great change should have its roots in the ages that went before it.” Bossuet, accordingly, made a heroic attempt to grapple with origins and causes, and in this way his book deserves its place as one of the very first of philosophic histories.
From writing history he turned to history in the making. In 1681 he was gazetted bishop of Meaux; but before he could take possession of his see, he was drawn into a violent quarrel between Louis XIV. and the pope (see Gallicanism). Here he found himself between two fires. To support the pope meant supporting the Jesuits; and he hated their casuists and dévotion aisée almost as much as Pascal himself. To oppose the pope was to play into the hands of Louis, who was frankly anxious to humble the Church before the State. So Bossuet steered a middle course. Before the general assembly of the French clergy he preached a great sermon on the unity of the Church, and made it a magnificent plea for compromise. As Louis
