Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. _London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._ ] [Illustration] BOSSUET The life of the Bishop of Meaux, a theologian and polemic familiarly known to his countrymen as the oracle of their church, forms an important part of the ecclesiastical history of the seventeenth century. A short personal memoir of such a man can serve only to excite curiosity, and in some measure to direct more extended inquiries. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, whose father and ancestors were honourably distinguished in the profession of the law, was born at Dijon, September 27, 1627. He was placed in his childhood at the college of the Jesuits in his native town; whence, at the age of fifteen, he was removed to the college of Navarre in Paris. At both these places his progress as a student was so rapid that he passed for a prodigy. It may be mentioned, not more as a proof of precocious intellect than as characteristic of the times, that soon after his removal to Paris, whither the fame of his genius had preceded him, he was invited to exhibit his powers as a preacher at the Hotel de Rambouillet in his sixteenth year. His performance was received with great approbation. In the year 1652 he was ordained priest, and, his talents having already made him known, he soon after received preferment in the cathedral church of Metz, of which he became successively canon, archdeacon, and dean. It was here that he published his Refutation of the Catechism of Paul Ferri, a protestant divine of high reputation. This was the first of that series of controversial writings which contributed, more than all his other works, to procure for him the high authority which he enjoyed in the church. He came forward in the field of controversy at a time when public attention was fixed on the subject, and when the favourite object both with Church and State was the peaceable conversion of the Protestants. Richelieu in the preceding reign had crushed, by the vigour of his administration, the political power of the Protestant party. He, in common with many other statesmen, Catholic and Protestant, had conceived a notion that uniformity of religious profession was necessary to the tranquillity of the state. But, though unchecked in the prosecution of his objects by any scruples of conscience or feelings of humanity, he would have considered the employment of force, where persuasion could be effectual, to be, in the language of a modern politician, not a crime but a blunder. When therefore the army had done its work, he put in action a scheme for reclaiming the Protestants by every species of politic contrivance. The system commenced by him was continued by others; and of all those who laboured in the cause, Bossuet was indubitably the most able and the most distinguished.