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Rh Church, in entrusting to him the keys of heaven, together with infallibility of the faith, which we have seen endure miraculously immovable in his successors unto this day.'

We now come to a period in which the Church in France, with the Court and Government, gave its testimony to the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, by a series of public acts which admit of no reply. From the year 1651 to 1681 the Jansenistic controversy was at its height.

In 1651, eighty-five bishops of France wrote to Innocent X., praying that the five propositions of Jansenius might be judged by the Apostolic See. They say: 'It is the solemn custom of the Church to refer the greater causes to the Holy See, which custom the never-failing faith of Peter demands in his right that we should perpetually observe. In obedience, therefore, to this most just law, we have determined to write to your Holiness on a subject of the greatest gravity in matter of religion.' At the end of the letter they add: 'Your Holiness has lately known how much the authority of the Apostolic See avails in the condemnation of the error in respect to the double head of the Church; "straightway the tempest was calmed, and at the voice and command of Christ the winds and the sea obeyed."'

After the condemnation of Jansenius by Innocent X. on June 9, 1653, the bishops of France again wrote, on July 15: 'In which affair,' they said, 'this is worthy of observation, that as, on the relation