"If there were no darkness," says he, "man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would have no hope of remedy.

Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery, and to know his own misery without knowing God." The lights of this great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs.

"One can be quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is," says he.
In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing prose which established the superiority of the French language.

At sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological examinations.

He was already famous at court as a preacher and a polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin.