While the pope has the principal voice in matters of faith, his judgment is subject to amendment until it has been approved by the Church. Bossuet, the leading spirit of this assembly, and indeed the most powerful and commanding Churchman of his day, esteemed the boasted infallibility of the pope a baseless fiction. He allowed that indefectibility belongs to the chair of Peter in the sense that heresy can not find there any continuous and stubborn support. But this, he maintained, in no wise precluded a temporary aberration of the individual pontiff or the competency of the universal Church to administer correction to the pontiff. Such principles had been at home in France ever since the era of the great Reform Councils of the fifteenth century. The pope—Innocent XI was then in the chair—was highly incensed, and refused confirmation to those members of the assembly of 1682 whom the king nominated to episcopal sees. Affairs remained in a very unsettled condition for a considerable interval, no mode of accommodation being reached, each party standing its ground; but in 1691 the French Church found itself with thirty-five bishoprics vacant, and the king allowed the twelve signers of the declaration whom he had nominated as bishops, but whom the pope had thus far refused to recognize as such, to retract all that had displeased the pontiff. The pope also gained some advantage from the bitter partisan conflicts within the Gallican Church during the closing years of Louis XIV. As to the amount of spiritual life in the Church during these years it is not so easy to acquire reliable information as it is concerning the more outward events. But there are many indications that it was very considerable, that the Roman Catholic Church at that period was in a very much better state than it is at present. There was an evident desire among a large number of its clergy to rid it of its gross superstitions. They opposed some of its absurdities, omitted many of its ridiculous ceremonies, endeavored to render Catholicism more rational and intelligent, more Scriptural and pious. There are tokens that France had then a very large number of true followers of the Savior; some in elevated stations whose virtues shine afar, but many more in obscure positions, God’s hidden ones, known only to Him and to those immediately around them. Among the more prominent of the writers on spiritual subjects flourishing at this time in France may be mentioned Antoinette Bourignon (died 1680), whose published works amount to twenty-five volumes: one of her hymns, “Come, Savior, Jesus, from above,” translated by John Wesley, is in our Hymnal, No. 379. Peter Poiret (died in 1719), court preacher of the Palatine, was an admirer of Madame Bourignon, whose works he published; he also brought out the works of Madame Guyon in thirty-nine volumes; he was both a philosopher and a deeply pious man. The Baron de Renty (1611-1649) was a man of the profoundest