insisted on his clergy making an anti-papal declaration, Bossuet got leave to draw it up, and made it as moderate as he could. And when the pope declared it null and void, he set to work on a gigantic Defensio Cleri Gallicani, only published after his death.
The Gallican storm a little abated, he turned back to a project very near his heart. Ever since the early days at Metz he had been busy with schemes for uniting the Huguenots to the Roman Church. In 1668 he converted Turenne; in 1670 he published an Exposition de la foi catholique, so moderate in tone that adversaries were driven to accuse him of having fraudulently watered down the Roman dogmas to suit a Protestant taste. Finally in 1688 appeared his great Histoire des variations des églises protestantes, perhaps the most brilliant of all his works. Few writers could have made the Justification controversy interesting or even intelligible. His argument is simple enough. Without rules an organized society cannot hold together, and rules require an authorized interpreter. The Protestant churches had thrown over this interpreter; and Bossuet had small trouble in showing that, the longer they lived, the more they varied on increasingly important points. For the moment the Protestants were pulverized; but before long they began to ask whether variation was necessarily so great an evil. Between 1691 and 1701 Bossuet corresponded with Leibnitz with a view to reunion, but negotiations broke down precisely at this point. Individual Roman doctrines Leibnitz thought his countrymen might accept, but he flatly refused to guarantee that they would necessarily believe to-morrow what they believe to-day. “We prefer,” he said, “a church eternally variable and for ever moving forwards.” Next, Protestant writers began to accumulate some startling proofs of Rome’s own variations; and here they were backed up by Richard Simon, a priest of the Paris Oratory, and the father of Biblical criticism in France. He accused St Augustine, Bossuet’s own special master, of having corrupted the primitive doctrine of Grace. Bossuet set to work on a Défense de la tradition, but Simon calmly went on to raise issues graver still. Under a veil of politely ironical circumlocutions, such as did not deceive the bishop of Meaux, he claimed his right to interpret the Bible like any other book. Bossuet denounced him again and again; Simon told his friends he would wait until “the old fellow” was no more. Another Oratorian proved more dangerous still. Simon had endangered miracles by applying to them lay rules of evidence, but Malebranche abrogated miracles altogether. It was blasphemous, he argued, to suppose that the Author of nature would break through a reign of law He had Himself established. Bossuet might scribble nova, mira, falsa, in the margins of his book and urge on Fénelon to attack them; Malebranche politely met his threats by saying that to be refuted by such a pen would do him too much honour. These repeated checks soured Bossuet’s temper. In his earlier controversies he had borne himself with great magnanimity, and the Huguenot ministers he refuted found him a kindly advocate at court. Even his approval of the revocation of the edict of Nantes stopped far short of approving dragonades within his diocese of Meaux. But now his patience was wearing out. A dissertation by one Father Caffaro, an obscure Italian monk, became his excuse for writing certain violent Maximes sur la comédie (1694) wherein he made an outrageous attack on the memory of Molière, dead more than twenty years. Three years later he was battling with Fénelon over the love of God, and employing methods of controversy at least as odious as Fénelon’s own (1697–1699). All that can be said in his defence is that Fénelon, four-and-twenty years his junior, was an old pupil, who had suddenly grown into a rival; and that on the matter of principle most authorities thought him right.
Amid these gloomy occupations Bossuet’s life came slowly to an end. Till he was over seventy he had scarcely known what illness was; but in 1702 he was attacked by the stone. Two years later he was a hopeless invalid, and on the 12th of April 1704 he passed quietly away. Of his private life there is little to record. Meaux found him an excellent and devoted bishop, much more attentive to diocesan concerns than his more stirring occupations would seem to allow. In general society he was kindly and affable enough, though somewhat ill at ease. Until he was over forty, he had lived among purely ecclesiastical surroundings; and it was probably want of self-confidence, more than want of moral courage, that made him shut his eyes a little too closely to the disorders of Louis XIV.’s private life. After all, he was not the king’s confessor; and to “reform” Louis, before age and Mme de Maintenon had sobered him down, would have taxed the powers of Daniel or Ezekiel. But in his books Bossuet was anything but timid. All of them, even the attacks on Simon, breathe an air of masculine belief in reason, rare enough among the apologists of any age. Bossuet would willingly have undertaken, as Malebranche actually undertook, to make an intelligent Chinaman accept all his ideas, if only he could be induced to lend them his attention. But his best praise is to have brought all the powers of language to paint an undying picture of a vanished world, where religion and letters, laws and science, were conceived of as fixed unalterable planets, circling for ever round one central Sun.
Authorities.—The best edition of Bossuet’s sermons is the Œuvres oratoires de Bossuet, edited by Abbé Lebarq, in 6 vols. (Paris, 1890–1896). His complete works were edited by Lachat, in 31 vols. (Paris, 1862–1864). A complete list of the innumerable works relating to him will be found in the Bossuet number of the Bibliothèque des bibliographies critiques, compiled by Canon Charles Urbain, and published by the Société des Études Historiques (Paris, 1900). The general reader will find all he requires in the respective studies of M. Rebelliau, Bossuet (Paris, 1900), and M. Gustave Lanson, Bossuet (Paris, 1901). In English there is a modest Bossuet by Mrs Sidney Lear (London, 1874), and two remarkable studies by Sir J. Fitz-James Stephen in the second volume of his Horae Sabbaticae (London, 1892). (St. C.)
BOSTANAI, the name of the first exilarch under Mahommedan rule, in the middle of the 7th century. The exilarchs had their seat in Persia, and were practically the secular heads of the Jewish community in the Orient.
BOSTON, THOMAS (1676–1732), Scottish divine, was born at
Duns on the 17th of March 1676. His father, John Boston, and
his mother, Alison Trotter, were both Covenanters. He was
educated at Edinburgh, and licensed in 1697 by the presbytery
of Chirnside. In 1699 he became minister of the small parish of
Simprin, where there were in all “not more than 90 examinable
persons.” In 1704 he found, while visiting a member of his
flock, a book which had been brought into Scotland by a commonwealth
soldier. This was the famous Marrow of Modern Divinity,
by Edward Fisher, a compendium of the opinions of leading
Reformation divines on the doctrine of grace and the offer of the
Gospel. Its object was to demonstrate the unconditional freeness
of the Gospel. It cleared away such conditions as repentance,
or some degree of outward or inward reformation, and argued
that where Christ is heartily received, full repentance and a new
life follow. On Boston’s recommendation, Hog of Carnock
reprinted The Marrow in 1718; and Boston also published
an edition with notes of his own. The book, being attacked
from the standpoint of high Calvinism, became the standard
of a far-reaching movement in Scottish Presbyterianism. The
“Marrow men” were marked by the zeal of their service and
the effect of their preaching. As they remained Calvinists they
could not preach a universal atonement; they were in fact
extreme particular redemptionists. In 1707 Boston was translated
to Ettrick. He distinguished himself by being the only
member of the assembly who entered a protest against what
he deemed the inadequate sentence passed on John Simson,
professor of divinity at Glasgow, who was accused of heterodox
teaching on the Incarnation. He died on the 20th of May 1732.
His books, The Fourfold State, The Crook in the Lot, and his
Body of Divinity and Miscellanies, long exercised a powerful influence over the Scottish peasantry.
His Memoirs were published in 1776 (ed. G. D. Low, 1908). An edition of his works in 12 volumes appeared in 1849. (D. Mn.)
BOSTON, a municipal and parliamentary borough and seaport of Lincolnshire, England, on the river Witham, 4 m. from its mouth in the Wash, 107 m. N. of London by the Great Northern railway. Pop. (1901) 15,667. It lies in a flat agricultural fen district, drained by numerous cuts, some of which are navigable. The church of St Botolph is a superb Decorated
