Nothing more was wanting, it was said, to all the strange things that had happened on this subject, than to forbid without success the faculty of divinity from teaching a doctrine which it cost so much trouble to make them receive. Philosophy, above all, laughed in silence at all these extravagancies, and amused herself with this new change of the scene, waiting with patience for an opportunity of profiting by it. Those among the philosophers who hoped for no good from these quarrels, took the still wiser part, of laughing at the whole. They observed the mutual rancour of the Jansenists and their adversaries, with that disinterested curiosity with which they observe the combats of animals, well assured, let what would happen, of ending cause to laugh at the expence of some of them. So many blows reciprocally struck on both sides with violence, did not yet reach the Jesuits; employed on one hand in arming the bishops against the expiring remains of the Jansenists their enemies; and on the other, in animating, underhand, the court of France against the parliaments, they were the secret soul of all this war, without appearing to intermeddle in it. But the Jansenists, who, in the quarrel concerning the sacraments, had, or at least thought they had, gained ground, grew bolder by degrees, seemed to prepare for a more decisive stroke; and the arch-bishop, their enemy, whetted, without knowing it, by his zeal, the sword with which the society was soon to be pierced. Two capital errors which the Jesuits committed about that time at Versailles, began to shake their credit, and to prepare from afar their disaster. They refused, as we are assured, through motives of human respect, to take under their direction some powerful personages[14], who had no reason to expect from them a severity so singular in many respects. This indiscreet refusal, it is said, contributed to hasten their ruin by the very hands which they might have made their support: thus these men, who had been so often accused of loose morals, and who had maintained themselves at court by such morals alone, were undone the moment that they wanted (even to their own great regret) to profess severity; an abundant subject for reflexions, and an evident proof that the Jesuits, from the very first till that time, had taken the right way to support themselves, seeing they ceased to be, the moment that they deviated from it. It is added, that at the same time that they displeased the court by their scruples, they displeased it also by their intrigues. They laid, it was said, snares for some men in place, whose crime in their eyes was that of being wanting in devotion to the society, the only country which they know: the usual effect of these sorts of attacks is, to strengthen the credit which they do not overthrow; those who were the objects of the Jesuitical plots obtained but the more favour by that means.