Nevertheless, after the council of Nice, the Arians were, from that time, hereticks declared, not withstanding the partisans that still adhered to them. It may be; it is even out of doubt, that in the councils which have decided on matters of faith, many of the bishops declared for the good cause, through views of policy, interest, or passion. Witness the unhappy facility with which most of the prelates, who, under Constantine, had declared that the Word was God, declared afterwards, under Constantius, that it was but a man. Witness again the violent conduct of St. Cyril, and of the council of Ephesus, with regard to Nestorius. Witness, lastly, the intrigues which too often disturbed those holy assemblies, and affronted, as we may say, the Holy Ghost, that presides in them. But still, once more, it is not the motives, it is the result of the decision, that the faithful ought to consider. It is by this result alone that they ought to abide: they would have too much to do, if it were necessary for them to go back again to the causes which dictated the decree. God hath promised to his church infallibility in her decisions; but he has not promised to every individual purity in his motives: he makes use of all sorts of means, even of the passions of men, for making the truth triumph, and be known; and he employs human things, in order to make divine matters succeed.” Agreeably to these reasonings (the justness of which we pretend by no means to judge of) the partisans of the bull thought themselves warranted to treat the Jansenists as declared sectaries. The latter said, in their defence, that the universal church was possessed of their cause, by the appeal which they had made to a future council; and that, ‘till the decision which they waited for, they could not be cast out of her bosom. It was replied, that a crowd of hereticks, to begin with Pelagius, so odious to the modern Jansenists, had been looked upon and treated as innovators, without having been condemned expressly by any œcumenical council. They objected, that the bull proposed in reality not one truth for belief; the accumulated qualifications of _hereticks_, _smelling_ of _heresy_, of _ill sounding_, of _offending pious ears_, &c. were not applied to any one proposition of father Quesnel’s in particular. Some of their adversaries, after the example of an illustrious chief of Israel[12], replied to them, (making a jest probably both of them and the bull) that it proposed “to believe with an implicit faith indeterminate truths:” others said simply, that in a list of poisons, it was not necessary to mark expressly the degree of malignity of each, in order to warn people to abstain from them. It was demanded again of the Jansenists, how the church could preserve one of her essential characters, that of being _visible_, if she were reduced to a handful of priests, opposed to all the other pastors? And they replied, that the true church, the _visible_ church, was that which taught