Page:William John Sparrow-Simpson - Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility (1909).djvu/113

 ] of France maintains. "Innocent XII. did not ask me to abandon them," added Louis. "He knew that such a demand would be useless." And there the matter stayed. Clement XI. acquiesced, like his predecessors, in the independence of the Church in France from Ultramontane opinions.

The attack on the principles of the Church of France led Bossuet to write his greatest work—The Defence of the Declaration. Since the chief responsibility for producing the Declaration had fallen upon him, it became naturally his duty to defend it. From the year of the Assembly onward to the end of his life, some twenty years, he devoted an immensity of labour to its compilation. More than once proposals were made to publish, but reasons of State made it prudent not to offend the Pope, and the book never appeared during Bossuet's life. The MS. was left to Louis XIV., and in 1745 was printed. It is impossible in a limited space to give an adequate idea of the character of this monumental work. It is written in terse and vigorous Latin. It occupies two large 8vo. volumes of some 750 pages each. Suffice it to say that the most powerful refutation of Papal Infallibility ever published came from the pen of the most distinguished Bishop of the Church in France; from one who lived and died in communion with the Roman See. Authority never passed a censure on this work. Bossuet's Defence powerfully influenced belief in the Church in France. Many instances can be produced to show that it guided and taught the teachers of that Church down to the time of the Vatican Council itself. These volumes have proved the storehouse whence the most telling opposition to Ultramontanism has been derived.

Now the special interest is that this Defence of the