St Paul.1 And the controversy which their labours were destined once more to awaken in the bosom of the Catholic Church was nothing else than the old dispute which, since the days of Augustine and Pelagius, had more than once already agitated it.
The fellow-students continued their studies near Bayonne for five years. So closely did they work, that Jansen is said to have spent days and nights in the same chair, snatching only brief intervals of rest. A game at battledore and shuttlecock occasionally relieved their vigils; but no serious employment divided their attention with the arduous task upon which they had entered, of mastering and digesting the principles of the Augustinian theology. The Bishop of Bayonne offered preferment to D’Hauranne, and there were projects of settling Jansen also at the head of a college; but it was not till some time afterwards that either of them entered upon official labours. They were left during those years to the uninterrupted studies which subsequently resulted in the great work of Jansen. The system of theological thought associated with his name was then definitely matured.