monument, if you can call it monument, is scarcely less insignificant
than the simple block, in the cemetery of Plainpalais at Geneva, that
is traditionally said to mark the resting-place of Calvin. Yet Jansen,
in his way, proved almost a second Calvin in his death, and menaced the
Church from his grave with a second Reformation. He left behind in
manuscript a book called "Augustinus," the predestinarian tenor of
which was condemned finally, though nearly a century later, by Pope
Clement XI., in 1713, in the Bull called Unigenitus. Jansenism,
however, had struck deep its roots in France, and still survives in
Holland at the present day, at Utrecht, as a sect that is small,
indeed, but not altogether obscure. Jansen himself, it may be noted,
was a Hollander by birth, having been born in 1585 at Akkoi in that
kingdom.
If Ypres is to be praised appropriately as a still delightful old city
that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the outward
aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one has left one's
self without any proper stock of epithets with which to appraise at its
proper value the charm and romance of Bruges. Of late years, it is
true, this world-famed capital of West Flanders has lost something of
its old somnolence and peace. Malines, in certain quarters, is now much
more dead-alive, and Wordsworth, who seems to have visualized Bruges in
his mind as a network of deserted streets, "whence busy life hath
fled," might perhaps be tempted now to apply to it the same prophetic
outlook that he imagined for Pendragon Castle:
"Viewing
As in a dream her own renewing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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