The monkish system retained its ancient style, with little alteration, until it received an enhancement, and a somewhat new character in France, in the hands of the followers of Jansen, and the Port Royal recluses. Then the old doctrine of religious abstraction—of the merging of the soul in Deity, and of the merit and efficacy of penitential suicide, was revived with an intensity never before known and was recommended by a much larger admixture of genuine scriptural knowledge than had ever before been connected with the same system, and was graced by the brilliant talents and great learning of many of the party; while at the same time the endurance of persecution gave depth, force, and heroism, to the sentiments of the sect. It was inevitable that whatever of good might arise within the church of Rome, and remain in allegiance to it, must pass over to the ancient and venerated form of monkish piety. The religion of the monastery was the only sort of devotedness and seriousness known to, or sanctioned by, that church. A new sect of fervent religionists could therefore do no otherwise than either fall into that style, or denounce it; and the latter would have been to break from Rome, and to side with Huguenots. Embarrassed at every step by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, which they perpetually felt to be at variance with the duty they owed to God, and heavily oppressed and galled by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of the church in which alone they thought salvation could be had, and still more deeply injured by their own zealously loved ascetic doctrine, these good men obtained possession, and made profession of, the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. They have left in their voluminous and valuable writings, a body of divinity, doctrinal and practical, which, when the peculiar circumstances of its production are considered, presents a matchless proof of the intrinsic power of Christianity, upbearing so ponderous a mass of error.