and amorous melodies of the Troubadours. He was rusticated from his college for some faux pas with the sex. It was nothing very serious, we imagine (he was only eighteen), and he was restored to his classes within the year. After his great sermon on the Prodigal Son, in which he so profoundly analyzes the workings of the voluptuous passions, he was asked "where, being a recluse, he could have obtained such a profound knowledge of the voluptuous life?" He replied, "In my own heart."

He was not only born in the land of love and song, he was born an orator. It is related of him that in early childhood he was accustomed, on Sundays and holy days, to gather his comrades around him, then mount a rock, a box, or a chair, and declaim to them the substance of the sermon he had heard at mass. In college he pursued the humanities with the greatest zeal, and was greatly distinguished in all the rhetorical exercises; yet after becoming a priest and furnished with such a magnificent equipment, he grew shy of this great talent, made repeated attempts to escape the pulpit, and finally began the exercise of his remarkable gifts only on the absolute command of the superior of his order. From the first moment a brilliant career was assured. Success swiftly followed success. He passed rapidly up the ladder of promotion. The great capital was already whispering his fame, when in his thirty-third year he found himself actually planted in that wicked Babylon, and summoned to preach in its most prominent pulpits. Improving his opportunity to hear the greatest preachers there (including of course Bossuet and Bourdaloue, and probably Fléchier and Mascaron), he said on one occasion to a brother priest who accompanied him: "I feel their intellectual force, I recognize their great talents; but if I preach, I shall not preach like them." And surely he did not.

From this moment, to hear a sermon of Massillon was a new experience to Paris. Many stories have come down to us of the effects of this new method in the hands of this unparalleled master. We can cite but a specimen. To illustrate how widely his influence pervaded. the lowest as well as the highest classes of society, it is related that when Massillon was to preach in Notre Dame, the crush at the entrance was something extraordinary even for a Paris crowd. On one occasion a rather powerful woman of the town, bent on hearing him, roughly elbowing her way through the mass, whispered aloud, “Eh! wherever this devil of a Massillon preaches, he makes such a row!" Baron, the comic author and actor, at that time the leading star of the French stage, soon went to hear him. Struck by the simplicity of his manner and the impressive truthfulness of his elocution, he said to a brother actor who accompanied him, "There, my friend, is an orator: we are but players." Laharpe relates that a courtier,

going to a new opera, found his carriage blocked in a double file of carriages, the one bound for the opera, the other for the Quinzevingts. The church was near where Massillon was preaching. In his impatience he dismounted from the carriage, and out of curiosity for a sight of the famous preacher, he entered the church. The sermon was already begun. It was the celebrated discourse 'On the Word of God.' At that moment Massillon raised his usually downcast look, and sweeping the congregation with his wonderful eye, uttered the apostrophe - Tu es ille vir! [Thou art the man.] The gentleman was struck as by an arrow. He remained till the end of the sermon, fixed in his place as by a charm. At the close he did not go to the opera, but returned to his home a changed man. Bourdaloue, after hearing him, being asked by a distinguished brother of his own order how he ranked the new orator, is said to have replied in the words of the Forerunner concerning the just appearing Messiah: "He must increase, but I must decrease.» The celebrated compliment of Louis XIV. at the close of the Grand Carême,' though threadbare and possibly intended to be equivocal, must not be omitted, because it was unquestionably as true as it was elegant, when he said to him: "Father, I have heard several great orators in my chapel; I have been mightily pleased with them: as for you, every time I have heard you, I have been very much displeased with myself." He presently added: "And I wish to hear you, father, hereafter every two years." Yet for this or some other now unknown reason, Massillon was never again invited by Louis XIV. to preach before him. Bourdaloue, than whom there could be no abler or severer judge, after reading his printed discourses declared: "The progress one has made in eloquence must be judged of by the relish he finds in reading Massillon's works." In 1717 he was appointed by Louis XV. Bishop of Clermont, and in 1719 he was elected one of the French Academy. He died at the age of eighty, of apoplexy, in his country. house a few miles outside his see-city.

Now what were the great and distinguishing features of this "new method," which resulted in such enormous contemporary as well as lasting success? Setting aside, as having been sufficiently noticed, the extraordinary witchery of his person, of his voice, of his manner, of even his delicious language and perfect literary form, what particulars can we discover, in the printed pages of his sermons, as we have them in our hands to-day, to account for the prodigious strength and unrelaxing permanence of his grip on the minds and hearts of men? This we shall try to show in the selections we now offer the reader from his most famous discourses.

There are two observations to be made in a general way toward answering this question, before descending to more definite particulars.

One strikes us, on the first notice of the subjects he has chosen to discourse on. He had observed, he once said, that there was too much dwelling on external manners and a general and vague morality. If we examine, we find that his subject-matter is always something definite and personal, something that comes home to "the business and bosom of every one of his auditory. This is too evident in every one of his discourses to need any citations.

Then it is conspicuous how little space he gives to establishing accepted truths and general propositions universally adopted. He assumes these, or at most confirms them in a paragraph or two. Then he sets himself to search out in the bottom of the hearts of his hearers in their criminal attachments, in their earthly interests— the reasons why each one in particular, without contesting the existence of the law or the necessity of obeying it, pretends that he can give himself a dispensation from submitting himself to it. This too, as we shall see, appears in every sermon.

Another characteristic which pervades his whole method, and is found in every discourse, and in which Buffon in his treatise on 'Eloquence' gives it as his judgment that Massillon surpasses all the orators ancient and modern, is called in the schools Amplification. It consists in the difficult but effective art of developing a principal thought in one long composite sentence, which occupies an entire paragraph, and is made up of an expanding series of intensifying clauses, flowing in one indivisible stream of multiplying minor thoughts, which roll the fundamental sentiment along, exhibiting continually new relations, new colors, new charms, with ever increasing force. As he thus revolved his thought through every application and under every light, not only did the gathering force bear on all before it, but each individual for himself, sooner or later, found his own moral picture flashed into his soul; and these individual convictions, melting into one mighty sentiment, set the whole auditory in commotion as if it were but a single soul. For an example of the pathetic thus amplified, take the famous

THE

PICTURE OF THE DEATH-BED OF A SINNER

HEN the dying sinner, finding no longer in the remembrance of the past, anything but regrets which overwhelm him; in all which is passing from his sight, but images which afflict him; in the thought of the future, but horrors which affright him; - knowing no longer to whom he should have recourse: neither to the creatures, which are escaping from him, nor to the world, which is vanishing; nor to men, who do not know how

to deliver him from death; nor to the just God, whom he regards as his declared enemy, whose indulgence he must no longer expect; he revolves his horrors in his soul; he torments himself, he tosses himself hither and thither, to flee from death which is seizing him, or at least to flee from himself; from his dying eyes issues a gloomy wildness which bespeaks the furiousness of his soul; from the depths of his dejection he throws out words broken by sobs, which one but half understands, and knows not whether it is despair or repentance which has given them form; he casts on the crucifix affrighted looks, and such as leave us to doubt whether it is fear or hope, hatred or love, which they mean; he goes into convulsions in which one is ignorant whether it is the body dissolving, or the soul perceiving the approach of her judge; he sighs deeply, and one cannot tell whether it is the memory of his crimes which is tearing these sighs from him, or his despair at relinquishing life. Finally, in the midst of his mournful struggles, his eyes become fixed, his features change, his countenance is distorted, his livid mouth falls open; his whole body trembles, and with this last struggle his wretched soul is sorrowfully torn from this body of clay, falls into the hands of God, and finds itself at the foot of the awful tribunal.

New translation by J. F. B.

In his painting of manners to be reproved, while always abiding in the perfection of elegance, he sometimes descended with a frank and bold simplicity to startling details. An example of this stripping luxury naked for chastisement appears in the following exposure of the ways by which it seeks to elude the rigor of the precept, from the opening sermon of the 'Grand Carême,' on

FASTING

TEXT: “Cum jejunatis, nolite fieri sicut hypocritæ, tristes.”— VULGATE. [When thou fastest, be not like the hypocrites, sad.-FRENCH TRANSLATION.]

M

Y BRETHREN, there is more than one kind of sadness. There is a sadness of penitence which works salvation, and the joy of the Holy Spirit is always its sweetest fruit; a sadness of hypocrisy, which observes the letter of the law, wearing an affected exterior, pale and disfigured, in order not to lose before men the merit of its penitence,-and this is rare; finally, there is a sadness of corruption, which opposes to this holy law.

a depth of corruption and of sensuality: and one may safely say that this is the most universal impression which is made on us by the precept of the fast and of abstinence.

I ask you whether, if it mortified the body and the passions of the flesh, this ought to be by the length of the abstinence, or by the simplicity of the food one makes use of, or in the frugality which one observes in his repasts. Pardon me this detail: it is here indispensable, and I will make no abuse of it.

Is it the length of the abstinence? But if, for gathering the fruit and merit of the fast, the body must languish and faint in the restriction of its nourishment, in order that the soul, while expiating her profane voluptuousness, may learn in this natural desire what ought to be her hunger and her thirst for the everlasting righteousness, and for that blessed estate in which, established again in the truth, we shall be delivered from all these humiliating necessities, -oh, what of the useless and unfruitful fasts in the Church!

Alas! the first believers, who did not break it till after the sun was set; they whom a thousand holy and laborious exercises had prepared for the hour of the repast: they who during the night which preceded their fasting, had often watched in our temples, and chanted hymns and canticles on the tombs of the martyrs,— these pious believers might safely have referred the whole merit of their fasting to the length of their abstinence, and yet only then could their flesh and their criminal passions be enfeebled. But for us, my brethren, it is no longer there that the merit of our fastings must be sought; for besides that the Church, by consenting that the hour of the repast should be advanced, has spared this rigor to the faithful, what unworthy easements have not been added to her indulgence? It seems that all one's attention is limited to doing in a way that will bring one to the hour of the repast, without one's really perceiving the length and the rigor of the fasting.

And beyond this (since you oblige us to say it here, and to put these indecent details in the place of the great verities of religion), one prolongs the hours of his sleep in order to shorten. those of his abstinence; one dreads to feel for a single instant the rigor of the precept, one stifles in the softness of repose the prick of hunger, from which even the fasting of Jesus was not exempt; in the sloth of a bed one nurses a flesh which the Church had purposed to emaciate and afflict by punishment; and