"as a person of worth and integrity, answered, "that he knew not, nor heard of any such person, "in his lordship's whole district:'-and further

added, that he was newly returned from his "visit in the northern parts, and that he neither “had heard, nor did know any person in that district, who could be accused of the said opinion " of jansenism.""

Still, the charges continued to be made, and the college at Douay continued to be involved in them. A letter of Dr. Witham*, the vicar apostolic of the midland district, to Dr. Paston, the president of that college, acquaints him that " cardinal "Paulucci had lately written to the two senior " vicars apostolic and to him, to acquaint them, that "his holiness had been informed, or, as the letter "has it, that notice had come to him, that many "and divers teachers and scholars in his college publicly taught and learned the false doctrine of "Jansenius; and had commanded the said Pau"lucci to signify to him, that he should, with all diligence possible, procure them to be removed, "that others might be substituted in their room, of singular piety, and particularly professors of the "catholic doctrine,-(for so he expresses himself,) "to the end that the see apostolic might not "otherwise be necessitated to suspend the pension

"

or rents usually allowed to the college, and "convert them to other uses."-The same circumstance is noticed, in the letter from Dr. James Smith to cardinal Caprara..

To defend themselves against these charges, the gentlemen of Douay college first made a firm and modest protestation of their innocence, and an explicit profession of their adherence to the holy see, and their absolute and unequivocal submission to the pontifical decrees on the subject of jansenism.They then transmitted to Rome a testimonial from the heads of the university and town of Douay, in favour of their piety and learning, the purity of their doctrine, and their equal freedom from loose morality and affected severity.-A testimonial was afterwards subscribed by the duke of Berwick, the duke of Perth, and other distinguished persons at the court of St. Germain, by which they declared,(as they said they were bound to do in justice and charity),—their perfect conviction that the charges brought against the college were false, invidious, and of a tendency to subvert peace and religion in the catholic church of England *.--At length, a visitation of Douay college took place, by the order of his holiness. A strict inquiry† was made into its doctrine and discipline; and two formal subscriptions to all the decrees of the holy see, on the subject of jansenism, were made,-one in 1710, by the four vicars apostolic, and the other in 1714, by the superiors of the college. With these, his holiness, in two letters written at his direction by cardinal Paulucci,declared himself to be abundantly satisfied.

Here the matter ended.-A serious and certainly an impartial examination of the proceedings of the * Dodd, vol. iii. p. 521. + Ib. 480.

jansenists, has led the writer to think that they were uniformly wrong:-wrong, in averring that the five propositions were not contained in the Augustinus; wrong, in maintaining that the church did not condemn them in the sense which the language of that work imported; wrong, in denying the right of the church to pronounce on the true sense of an author's writings on religious subjects; wrong, in all their distinctions and evasions; and wrong, in the excessive severity of their morality. This was the decided and avowed opinion of Bossuet, Fénélon, Fléchier, and Fleury; and the opinions of these eminent lights of the church are of the greater weight upon this point, as, with the exception of Fénélon, all of them abstained from the controversy.

That Lewis the fourteenth entered into it as he did, is greatly to be lamented: if he had left janşenism to the church, jansenism would, in all probability, have soon died away: it is difficult to find in history, a single instance, in which, if persecution has stopped short of extermination, it has not both increased and perpetuated the opinions which it was meant to proscribe.

It is also to be lamented, that the charge of jansenism was often inconsiderately made. It was a serious charge; and, in proportion as it was serious, should have been slowly and cautiously urged. Vague and indistinct imputations of it should have been avoided. We have seen the terms in which these were condemned by popes and prelates; those who made them should have reflected, that,

if bulls and briefs of the holy see condemned jansenism, bulls and briefs equally condemned these vague and indistinct imputations.

CHAP. LXXIV.

THE METHODISTS, THE ANTINOMIANS, AND MORAVIANS.

JANSENISM was more successful in intruding itself into the protestant than into the catholic church of England.

About the time, which these Memoirs have now reached, Methodism began to attract the notice of the public. The celebrated John Wesley, its patriarch, was hostile to the leading doctrines of jansenism; the celebrated George Whitfield, a rival chief of the same denomination, was their advocate; and the difference has been perpetuated between their disciples. Some account, in this place, of the Methodists, and of the Antinomians, and Moravians, with whom their history is intimately connected, will not, it is apprehended, be deemed foreign to the subject. We shall add a succinct statement of the difference between the roman-catholic church and the lutherans and methodists, on the subject of justification.

LXXIV. 1.

The Methodists.

TALENTS of no ordinary kind, and a devotional temper, were hereditary in the family of Wesley. He was born in 1703, at Epworth, in the Lindsay division of Leicestershire. Two books, "The "Following of Christ," usually ascribed to Thomas à Kempis*, and Dr. Jeremy Taylor's "Rules of "Holy Living and Dying," made an early and a lasting impression upon him. The taking up of the cross, as it is inculcated by these writers, at first revolted him :-mentioning this to his mother, a woman of uncommon intellectual powers, she gave him this excellent lesson: "Would you judge of "the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure,-take "this rule ;-whatever weakens your reason, im"pairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures

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your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiri"tual things;—in short,—whatever, increases the "strength and authority of your body over your "mind,—that thing is sin in you, however innocent

* A Life of Thomas à Kempis has been published by the writer of these pages, 1 vol. 8vo. Numerous are the treatises written to ascertain who is the author of The Imitation: this, even now, is the subject of a literary controversy at Paris, -See "Dissertation sur soixante Traductions Françaises de "l'Imitation de Jésus Christ, dédiée à sa Majesté l'Impératrice 66 et Reine. Par Ant. Alex. Barbier, bibliothécaire de sa majesté l'empereur et roi, et de son conseil d'état. Suivie des "considérations sur la question relative à l'auteur de l'Imita"tion. Paris, 1812, 8vo."