that the first and foremost of those enemies were the Jansenists. Not only did their doctrine of grace defy the favourite Jesuit principle of obedience to authority, but it bade fair to set aside the whole Catholic machinery of infallibility and sacraments. If God spoke directly to the individual conscience, what was the use of intermediaries? Led by his Jesuits, Louis wrung The Bull Unigenitus. from the unwilling Clement XI. the Bull Unigenitus (1713), which was intended to deprive believers in individual inspiration of all possible foothold within the Roman Church. The bull caused a violent uproar. Fénelon, although personally an admirer, admits that public opinion credited it with “condemning St Augustine, St Paul, and even Jesus Christ”; and the few Jansenist bishops appealed and “re-appealed” against it. But the government was inexorable; in 1730 the Unigenitus became part and parcel of the law of the land. Still, to make a law is one thing; to get it administered is quite another. The parlement of Paris was a strongly Gallican body, and had many grievances to avenge on Louis XV. and his ministers. To annoy them, it put every possible difficulty in the way of an execution of the bull. Under the fostering care of the judges, a belief sprang up that to call oneself a “Jansenist,” and oppose the Unigenitus, was to show oneself a lover of civil and religious liberty. This feeling was intensified by the conviction that every blow struck against the bull was a blow against the Jesuits, its authors. For the Society, as befitted the great exponent of authority and the keeper of the consciences of many kings, had always been on the side of political autocracy; and therefore it became increasingly unpopular, when once the tide of French intelligence began to set in the direction of revolutionary reform. Nor were the Jesuits in much better odour among other nations. Their perpetual meddling in politics, and even in speculation and finance, stank in the nostrils of every government in Europe; while their high-handedness and corporate greed in the matter of ecclesiastical privileges and patronage alienated the clergy. Their reform was more than once discussed; and death alone prevented Benedict XIV. (1740-58), the most remarkable of the 18th-century popes, from taking some very stringent measures. A year after Benedict's death the Suppression of the Jesuits. first blow fell. Pombal, the great reforming minister in Portugal, expelled them from that country on a the charge of having conspired against the life of the king. Two years later the Paris parlement had its chance. La Valette, superior of the Jesuit missions in Martinique, had set up as a West-India merchant on a large scale. His enterprises were unsuccessful; in 1761 he became insolvent, and the Society refused to be responsible for his debts. The French courts made the consequent bankruptcy proceedings the excuse for a general inquiry into the Society's constitution, and ended by declaring its existence illegal in France, on the ground that its members were pledged to absolute obedience to a foreigner in Rome. Louis XV. now proposed that the French Jesuits should be placed under some special organization, less obnoxious to his parlement. The general only made the famous reply: “Sint ut sunt, aut non sint.” Thereupon Louis let the judges have their way. In 1762 the Society was suppressed in France; in 1767 it was also declared illegal by Spain, Naples and other Italian powers. Pressure was now put on Clement XIII. to dissolve the Society altogether. He refused; but his successor, Clement XIV., was more pliable, and in 1773 the Jesuits ceased to be.
In France the philosophes and the quarrels over the Unigenitus had effectually killed the spirit of religion; nor was the Christianity of other countries at a much higher ebb. Spain was utterly dumb; Italian fervour could only boast the foundation of two small orders of popular preachers—the Passionists (1737), and the Redemptorists, instituted in 1732 by St Alfonso Liguori (q.v.), who also won for himself a dubious reputation on the unsavoury field of casuistry. German Catholicism was still in a very raw, unsophisticated state. It is characteristic that, while Paris had its Bossuets and Bourdaloues, Vienna was listening to Abraham a Sancta Clara, the punning Capuchin whom Schiller, regardless of dates, introduces into the opening scene of his Wallenstein. However, from Germany was to come a serious attempt at reform. There the vision of a reunion with the Protestants had haunted many Catholic brains ever since Bossuet and Leibniz had corresponded on the subject. Faithful to the ancient tradition of Contarini and Pole at Trent, these good men persisted in supposing that the Reformation was nothing more than a protest against practical abuses: remove the abuses, and the rest would follow of itself. And, inasmuch as they held that most abuses were due to the slippery Febronianism. and procrastinating greed of Roman officials, the first step should be ruthlessly to curtail the power of Rome and extend that of local Churches. Such was the theme of a book, De statu Ecclesiae, ad reuniendos dissidentes in religione Christianos compositus, published by one Justinus Febronius in 1763. The author was Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (q.v.), suffragan in partibus to the elector archbishop of Treves. Hontheim's theories could not but prove attractive to the local Churches, more especially when they were governed by bishops who were also temporal great lords. The three ecclesiastical electors and the prince-archbishop of Salzburg met in congress at Ems in 1786, and embodied Hontheim's proposals, though in a very modified form, in a document known as the “punctuation of Ems” (see Febronianism). Meanwhile, their overlord, the emperor Joseph II. (1780-90), was dealing with the question of a much more radical spirit, and actually abolishing abuses wholesale. The reign of “Brother Sacristan,” the nickname given to Joseph by Frederick the Great, was one continual suppression of superfluous abbeys, feast-days, pilgrimages. More dignified were his attempts to broaden the minds of the clergy. Instead of being brought up in diocesan seminaries, centres of provincial narrowness, candidates for ordination were to be collected into a few large colleges set up in university towns. Still, Joseph only touched the surface; his brother, the grand-duke Leopold of Tuscany, aspired to cut deeper, and provoke a religious revival on the lines of Jansenism. His plans, which made a great stir at the time, were outlined at a synod held at Pistoia in 1786 (see Pistoia, Synod of).
Three years later, however, the world had more important things to think of than Leopold's ecclesiastical reforms. At The French Revolution. first the French Revolution was by no means anti-Catholic—though the Constituent Assembly remembered too much of the quarrels about the Unigenitus not to be bitterly hostile to Rome—and its great aim was to turn the French Church into a purely national body. Hence it decreed the “civil constitution of the clergy.” Bishops and rectors were made elective, with salaries paid by the state; and all priests were required to take an oath of fidelity to the government: those who refused the oath rendered themselves liable to banishment. Three years later the triumph of the Jacobins brought with it the “abolition of Christianity,” and a spell of violent persecution, which gradually slackened under the Directory (1795-99). In 1799 Napoleon became First Consul, and at once set himself to deal with the ecclesiastical problem. There must clearly be a Church, and the small success of the Civil Constitution made clear that public opinion would not put up with a Church practically detached from Rome. On the other hand, Napoleon quite agreed with Louis XIV. in wishing to be master in his own house, and to turn the clergy into a supplementary police. Accordingly, in 1801 he negotiated with Pius VII. a Concordat, which remained in force till 1905 (see Concordat). The state undertook to pay France and the Papacy. the bishops and parochial clergy; it was directly to appoint the one, and to have a veto on the appointment of the other. But for the religious orders no provision was made; and Napoleon refused to tolerate the presence of unsalaried clerics on whom the government had no hold. When his fall brought about the restoration of Louis XVIII. (1815), this restriction was relaxed, and the “congregations” returned in large numbers to France. But the Bourbon government had no intention of encouraging them
