his imprisonment. “I am ready to remain here a hundred years; to die here, if God will. I am ready for whatever He designs—for action or for suffering.” The same faith and quiet assurance gave him his marvellous influence over others, and that fascination which made him a power in the cultivated society of Paris. All the Arnauld family more or less owned his influence; and it was his teaching mainly that peopled Port Royal with the Solitaries who have made it so illustrious.
The life and work of Jansen seem at first far removed from Port Royal. He returned to Louvain after his sojourn at Bayonne, and became a professor of theology in its famous university, on whose behalf he was employed in several political negotiations with the Spanish Court. Finally he was appointed Bishop of Ypres, in which capacity he is chiefly known in the ecclesiastical world. His fame, however, rests not on any political or ecclesiastical labours, but on the results flowing from his original studies at Bayonne. He never forgot his devotion to St Augustine. He is said to have read the whole of his writings ten times, and the treatises against the Pelagians not less than thirty times. The fruit of all this studious devotion was his work known briefly as the ‘Augustinus,’ 3 published two years after page 108his death (in 1640). Nothing could have seemed more innocent or laudable than the attempt by a bishop of the Church to set forth the doctrine of St Augustine. The book professed to have been undertaken in a humble spirit.
“I have avoided error where I could,” says the author; “for the cases in which I could not, I implore the reader’s pardon. . . . Let the knowledge of my sincerity make amends for the simplicity of my error. I know that if I have erred, it is not in the assertion of Catholic truth, but in the statement of the opinion of St Augustine; for I have not laid down what is true or false, what is to be held or rejected according to the faith of the Catholic Church, but only what Augustine taught and declared was to be held.”