Midway between the strongholds of Luther and Calvin lay the country of the Netherlands, rendered important at the time through the influence of its celebrated University of Louvain. Out of its curious people came that Cornelius Jansen whose name was to acquire a questionable celebrity through his championship of the new idea. A quondam conspirator in the interests of Philip II., he had been raised, for his services in that direction, to the See of Ypres. For twenty years he studied in his own way the great tomes of St. Augustine, reading his whole works ten times over, and his refutation of the Pelagians as many as thirty times. It was a period when theologians were much interested in grace, free will, predestination, and kindred questions. The Church had already condemned the theories of Baius in that regard, and Calvin's errors, which he claimed to have found in St. Augustine, had been refuted time and again. It was the work of Jansen to revive in a more classical form all these condemned doctrines and to seal them by an appeal to St. Augustine. To this end he finished before his death, in 1638, an immense work entitled _Augustinus_, which, however, was not published until 1640, two years after his death. Its heretical character was immediately recognized. The University of Paris censured five leading propositions extracted from the work, which were in turn formally condemned by Pope Urban VIII., in 1642. The Jansenists, however, endeavored to meet the Papal condemnation with casuistic subtlety. They resorted to a distinction between the orthodox sense of the propositions and the heretical sense in which they might be read; they thus claimed that Jansen understood them only in their orthodox sense, while they agreed that the propositions were rightly condemned in a heretical sense. Hence they declared that the five propositions were either not at all contained in the work of Jansen, or at least that they were not there in the sense condemned by the Bull of Urban VIII. To these observations Pope Alexander VII. replied by the Bull of 1656, wherein he condemned such distinctions, declaring that the five propositions were taken from the work of Jansen, and that they were condemned in the sense of that author. The Jansenists retorted by asserting that the Papal Bull was only a simple regulation of discipline, and that it could exact nothing more than a respectful silence. Practically the whole action of the new sectaries amounted to an effort to restrict the scope of Papal infallibility, in as much as they declared the Pope might rightly adjudicate in regard to dogmatic doctrines, but not in regard to dogmatic facts. Thus, he was right in condemning the five propositions, as they held, but wrong in declaring that Jansen taught them in a heretical sense. This distinction was formally condemned by Clement XI. in 1705, and the bishops and prelates of France were obliged to subscribe to a formula declaring that they