That the ecclesiastical power does not extend to the temporals of sovereigns; that a general council is superior to a pope, as decided by the fathers of Constance; that the judgment of the pope in matters of faith is not an infallible rule, until after having received the approbation of the church; that the laws and customs of the Gallican church ought to be maintained: such is the substance of the four articles. Innocent XI. condemned them; he refused bulls to the bishops nominated by the king, and forgot nothing that might provoke a separation; already a patriarchate was spoken of in France, independent of the court of Rome. It is of Innocent XI. that Fontaine speaks in these lines, addressed in 1688 to the Prince de Conti: Pour nouvelles de l’Italie Le pape empire tons les jours— Expliquez, seigneur, ce discours Du coté de la maladie: Car aucun Saint−pere autrement Ne doit empirer nullement Celai−ci, véritablement. N'est envers nous ni saint ni pere, &c. In English: As to the news from Italy, The pope each day grows worse and worse.— Upon the score of malady Explain my lord this strange discourse. In any other sense than this So to decline would be amiss, Yet much I fear the man you paint Will prove to us no other father−saint. Racine, in 1689, alluded to the same pope in these lines of the prologue of ‘Esther’: Et l’enfer, couvrant tout de ses vapeurs funèbres, Sur les yeux les plus saints ajete les tenèbres. In English.: “And hell with darkness spreading all the skies “Casts its thick film o’er the most holy eyes.” Bossuet had been the principal compiler of the four articles; the court of Rome, which wished to oppose to him an adversary worthy of him, offered the cardinalat to the celebrated Arnauld, if he would write against these four maxims. Amauld replied to this proposal as to an insult: it became necessary to, he says, “have not concealed the fact, that it depended on himself alone to be clothed with the Roman purple, and, that to attain a dignity which would have so gloriously washed away all the reproaches of heresy which his enemies have dared to make against him, it would have cost him nothing but to write against the propositions of the clergy of France relative to the pope’s authority.”