The passions of Louis XIV. were not, however, composed, and were awaiting only a favorable occasion for breaking forth into open heat. This occasion was offered in connection with a dispute concerning certain royal privileges in the ecclesiastical order, termed the _Regalia_. This was the right of the kings to enjoy the revenues of a vacant bishopric, and to confer, during the vacancy of a See, benefices without care of souls. The Parliament of Paris, by a sentence of 1668, had extended the regalia to all benefices which might be included in countries where the regalia had not previously obtained. King Louis XIV., by his edicts of 1673 and 1675, had confirmed that sentence, and the French clergy for fear of greater evils had approved. Two bishops, however, stood out against the edicts, and were deprived of their revenues in consequence; they were at the same time supported in their opposition by Pope Innocent XI. The Holy Father, when the question was brought before him, appealed to a decision of the Second Council of Lyons, held in 1474, which opposed the extension of the regalia. In two briefs of March and September 1677, he exhorted the French monarch to respect the rights of the vacant Sees; but when his exhortations were only disregarded, he issued two other briefs in 1678 and 1680, adding ecclesiastical menaces to his exhortations. _THE GALLICAN LIBERTIES._ It was at this juncture that Louis XIV. had recourse to his influence over the clergy in France, and perceiving that his encroachments were meeting with firmness upon the part of the Pope, he determined to effect a legal enactment whereby the powers of the Sovereign Pontiff should be made forever subservient to the will of the French king. Already in 1662 the University of the Sorbonne had signed six articles denying not only the divinely constituted primacy of the Pope, but asserting an undue independence in the powers of the king himself. To revive these articles as well as to strengthen his position in regard to the Holy See, the French Monarch convoked at Paris in 1682 an assemblage of the clergy which was attended by thirty-four archbishops and bishops, besides as many minor prelates. The members of this assemblage were invited individually by the king's order, and only such were called as were known to be in harmony with the pretensions of Louis XIV. Fenelon was not there, nor Mabillon, nor Bourdalone, nor many another brilliant light of the French Church, for the simple reason that they could not support the king in his unjust usurpations. The Convocation possessed at least one strong mind, that of Bossuet, the celebrated Bishop of Meaux, whose presence and action in such an assembly it is difficult to reconcile with his usual manly loyalty to Catholic principles. His excuse, that he hoped thereby to ward off greater evils and even schism from the Church is hardly of any value against the depressing influence of the act itself.