A task of such a character, carried out in such a spirit, might have seemed a harmless one. But the Jesuits had long marked both St Cyran and Jansen as theological foes, opposed to their special doctrines. They endeavoured therefore, first of all, to prevent the publication of Jansen’s work; and failing in this, they directed all their efforts to procure a condemnation of the book from the Court of Rome. “Never,” it has been said, “did any book receive a more stormy welcome. Within a few weeks of its appearance the University, the Jesuits, the executors of Jansen, the printer of the ‘Augustinus,’ the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, and the Papal Nuncio were engaged in a warfare of pamphlets, treatises, pasquinades, pleadings, synods, audiences, which it would be impossible to set forth in historical sequence.” {108} In the midst of all this, Jansen’s old fellow-student received the book, in the preparation of which he also had had some share, in his prison at Vincennes, as if an echo of his own thoughts. “It would last as long as the Church,” he said. “After St Paul and St Augustine, no one had written concerning grace like Jansen.” The Jesuits were resolved in their hostility. They knew that the book, while assuming a historical form, and professing in the main to represent the doctrine of Augustine as directed against the errorists of his own time, had a side reference to the “opinions of certain modern authors,” understood to be well-known theologians of their own school. This was in fact acknowledged in an appendix. Unable any longer to wreak their vengeance on the author himself, they were resolved to put his work under ban; and accordingly, a Bull was obtained from Rome in the summer of 1642, condemning Jansen by name, and declaring that the ‘Augustinus’ contained “many propositions already condemned” by the Holy See. It was doubted whether the Pope, Urban VIII., designed to go the length announced in the bull, and the terms of the condemnation were rumoured to have been inserted by a Papal officer in the interests of the Jesuits. The Universities of Louvain and Paris therefore did not take any steps to carry out the condemnation. They remained spectators of the controversy which raged around them, in which the Archbishop of Paris on one side, and the youngest of the Arnauld family on the other, were conspicuous.