Far from accepting these offers, he even wrote against a Flemish doctor who had treated these propositions as heretical. One of the king’s ministers who read this piece, charmed with the force of its reasoning, proposed having it printed at the Louvre; but the jealousy of M. Amauld’s enemies carried it against the fidelity of the minister and even the interest of the king; it might apply for defenders to an humbler rank, to the theologians of Louvain, to Gonzales general of the Jesuits, to Roccaberti the Dominican, Sfrondati the Benedictine, and to Aguirre, another Benedictine, who was rewarded with a red hat. Their writings are forgotten, but the ‘Defence of the four articles,’ remains among the number of Bossuet’s best works. We must observe, it was not printed till 1730, a delay which can only be ascribed to the intrigues of a part of the clergy, already repentant for their firmness in 1682. A more correct edition of the work of Bos-suet, and a French translation accompanied by notes, appeared in 1745, without privilege, and as issued from the press of Amsterdam. No direction of Louis XIV. if we except those of his will, has been worse executed than the edict by which he commanded that the doctrine of the four articles should be annually taught in the schools of theology. The Jesuits have never professed them, and the idea of abrogating them has been often entertained from the year 1700 to the end of cardinal Fleury’s ministry. If this abrogation has not taken place it was, that they feared the remonstrances of the Jansenists, and foresaw the credit it would give them, by constituting them sole defenders of the liberties of the Gallican church. In the matter of the franchises Louis XIV. was perhaps wrong. The other catholic monarchs had relinquished this strange privilege, by which the palaces of the ambassadors, and even their precincts, offered an asylum to malefactors from the pursuit of justice. The king of France declared that he never took the conduct of others for his rule, but on the contrary, that he meant to serve as their example. His ambassador, Lavardin, in 1687, came to Rome to assert the ‘Franchises’ and affected to brave the pontiff by a pompous entry. The censures thundered against Lavardin irritated Louis XIV: Avignon was once more taken; and these hasty disputes had led to a decisive rupture, if it were not possible to reconcile it with the severities exercised since 1685 against the protestants. The proscription of the Calvinists restored harmony in this delicate conjuncture between the court of France and the Holy See. Avignon was restored to the successor of Innocent XI. Alexander VIII. who condemned equally the Four Articles of 1682. Innocent XII. after him, persevered in refusing bulls to the bishops, favourers of the four articles, and he obtained from them a letter which he accepted as a retraction. It said, in effect,³²²