Artaud de Montor, in his _Lives of the Popes_ writes in this connection: "Assuredly, if the archbishops and bishops made no resistance to the signing of the four articles; if they thought that such a notification might become useful to the Church; if they recognized that the authority of the Pope was to be thus boldly limited; if they thought it requisite to curb what Bruno called the Tiberine tyranny, they must now at length have discovered that they were subject to a perfectly insatiable authority, which would employ not even the language of the country to exhort and enjoin them to exert their authority in diffusing a doctrine more administrative than Christian, and more military than religious, with a view to substitute for the words of peace, concord, and mildness, new words of command, injunction, unbridled will, to which Catholicity was no longer accustomed. From the Attorney-General who thus lectures the bishops, to the Attorney-General who has immediately under his hand the secular power, there is, in such times, but a step. The same hand countersigned a document, and ordered the sword to leap from the scabbard." In the meantime the Roman court was not idle. On the 11th of April, 1682, Pope Innocent XI. annulled the propositions by a brief, and refused to grant canonical bulls to the bishops named by King Louis XIV. The hostile attitude of France continued openly for ten years, and it was only in 1693 that the King agreed that the provisions of his edict were not to be enforced. The spirit of Gallicanism, however, after being thus fostered for a decade in the schools and colleges of France was not to be eradicated by a mere permission of tolerance. A generation had grown up imbued with its false principles and ready to cast broadside through the country the seeds of a lasting hostility towards the Papal prerogatives. In fact, all through the whole course of the eighteenth century the creed of Gallicanism governed in a large measure the whole action and liturgy of the French Church. Its attitude of independence in regard to the Holy See very naturally encouraged that rising anti-Christianism which found its most potent foe in the successor of St. Peter. Even in the nineteenth century it possessed a certain life. Napoleon, in his Organic Articles, imposed it upon the seminaries of France even more strictly than did Louis XIV., at an earlier day. It has ever been the great obstacle to Catholic unity in France, the source of persecution against the Church; and if it virtually died in that country about the time of the Vatican Council, in 1870, its absence was never more noteworthy and consoling than at the present day when the whole French episcopacy stands united to a man in its loyalty and devotion to the Holy See. _VAN ESPEN._