CHAPTER IX
BOSSUET
The struggle between the Sorbonne and the Jesuits was no mere struggle between a theological school and a religious community. The universities held, in the theological controversies of those days, a position with which nothing modern exactly corresponds. They were exponents of the religious conceptions of the Church. They derived from it their principles and returned to it their inferences and suggestions. The Sorbonne was not an isolated school of independent theological speculators. It represented, generally speaking, the mind of the Church in France. Of course universities might utter conflicting decisions. But it is peculiarly true of the Sorbonne that it represented the indigenous as opposed to the imported theology of France. While the Ultramontane was Italian in origin, a foreign product, like the Jesuit, and under foreign control, the Sorbonne was typical of the traditions of the Church within the Kingdom. Its sentiments were endorsed by the Bishops. Political incidents occasioned the famous collective expression of the traditional convictions of the French Church in the Assembly of Clergy in 1682. That Assembly arose out of an unexpected collision between Louis XIV. and Pope Innocent XI, in a question of the relation between the Church and the
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