For the moment a churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance, abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.
We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to prove, and how promptly.

In little more than forty years after the triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of Reason.

The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and peremptorily awakened.

She found herself confronted by the most energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress ever inspired.

Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was no more than a trifling episode in a family quarrel.