libertines than to see themselves continually under the observation
of this ever-watchful eye of Providence. They have felt it as an
importunate compulsion to recognise that there is in Heaven a
superior force which governs all our movements and chastises our
loose actions with a severe authority. They have wished to shake off
the yoke of this Providence, in order to maintain, in independence,
an unteachable liberty which moves them to live at their own fancy,
without fear, discipline, or restraint." [Passage from Bossuet,
quoted by Brunetiere, op. cit. 58.] Bossuet was thus working in the
same cause as the Jansenists.

He had himself come under the influence of Descartes, whose work he
always regarded with the deepest respect. The cautiousness of the
master had done much to disguise the insidious dangers of his
thought, and it was in the hands of those disciples who developed
his system and sought to reconcile it at all points with orthodoxy
that his ideas displayed their true nature. Malebranche's philosophy
revealed the incompatibility of Providence--in the ordinary
acceptation--with immutable natural laws. If the Deity acts upon the
world, as Malebranche maintained, only by means of general laws, His
freedom is abolished, His omnipotence is endangered, He is subject
to a sort of fatality. What will become of the Christian belief in
the value of prayers, if God cannot adapt or modify, on any given
occasion, the general order of nature to the needs of human beings?
These are some of the arguments which we find in a treatise composed
by Fenelon, with the assistance of Bossuet, to demonstrate that the
doctrine of Malebranche is inconsistent with piety and orthodox
religion. They were right. Cartesianism was too strong a wine to be
decanted into old bottles. [Footnote: Fenelon's Refutation of
Malebranche's Traite de la nature et de la grace was not published