A task of such a character, carried out in such a spirit, might have seemed a harmless one.
But the Jesuits had long marked both St Cyran and Jansen as theological foes, opposed to their special doctrines. They endeavoured therefore, first of all, to prevent the publication of Jansen’s work; and failing in this, they directed all their efforts to procure a condemnation of the book from the Court of Rome. “Never,” it has been said, “did any book receive a more stormy welcome. Within a few weeks of its appearance the University, the Jesuits, the executors of Jansen, the printer of the ‘Augustinus,’ the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, and the Papal Nuncio were engaged in a warfare of pamphlets, treatises, pasquinades, pleadings, synods, audiences, which it would be impossible to set forth in historical sequence.” 4 In the midst of all this, Jansen’s old fellow-student received the book, in the page 109preparation of which he also had had some share, in his prison at Vincennes, as if an echo of his own thoughts. “It would last as long as the Church,” he said. “After St Paul and St Augustine, no one had written concerning grace like Jansen.”
The Jesuits