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M. de St. Cyran's private life proves him to have been a most eminently pious man. The extensive effects which he produced on his age, prove him to have been a truly great one. It is however by those effects, that this greatness is chiefly perceptible to posterity. The talents in which he supereminently excelled, were those rather calculated to obtain a powerful influence over his contemporaries, than to secure a brilliant posthumous fame.

His distinguishing talents were spiritual direction and conversation. In these he eminently excelled. But the peculiar characteristic of M. de St. Cyran was a firmness and strength of character, by which he not merely attracted the hearts, but gained a most powerful ascendancy over the minds of all with whom he conversed.

It has already been sufficiently observed;

but

shews forth his boundless power and his unsearchable wisdom; it belongs to the other merely, not only to dis play these attributes in a yet more perfect manner; above all to give some faint image of the unutterable sanctity of his holiness, and riches of his love.

that M. de St. Cyran was a man of extensive theological learning, and of profound research in ecclesiastical antiquity. As a writer, he held a very respectable rank. With such exalted piety and deep erudition he could scarcely do otherwise. Nevertheless, he possibly owes his literary reputation chiefly to the unbounded affection and veneration of his disciples.

Perhaps M. de St. Cyran's works might have ranked more highly, had they not been so completely eclipsed by those of his followers. Most readers recollect that the Lettres Provinciales became the standard of the French language. Their expectations of M. de St. Cyran's works are formed from the writings of Pascal, Nicole, Arnauld, Racine, Saci, Tillemont, le Nain, St. Beuve, Lancelot, d'Andilli, Hermant, St. Marthe, Du Fossé, Fontaine, Quesnel, St. Amour, &c. Accustomed to the splendour of these great lights of the Port Royal school, and habituated to the classic elegance with which their erudition and piety is clothed; the world naturally, though

perhaps unreasonably, expects to meet these excellences united in a transcendent degree, in the writings of the man who formed such disciples.

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Only one or two of M. de St. Cyran's works are yet generally read. Those most likely to profit persons who seek rather to grow in piety, than to enter into the controversies of the times, are as follows," Lettres Spirituelles," reprinted at Lyons, 1679, in 3 vols. in 12mo. Another volume, containing little tracts, has since been added. They are chiefly brief explanations of Christian doctrine, and thoughts on Christian poverty.

A pseudonymous publication in folio, under the name of Petrus Aurelius, has been generally attributed to M. de St. Cyran. Others have considered it as a joint production of himself and his nephew M. de Barcos. This work obtained in its day a high reputation, and a very extensive celebrity.

The clergy of France published an edition at their own expense, in 1642.

In the eye of the world, the greatest glory of M. de St. Cyran is doubtless this. He was the founder of the wide celebrity of Port Royal, and he had both the Arnaulds, the le Maitres, Nicole, and Pascal, for his disciples. His greatest glory in the sight of Christians is, that he was the blessed instrument of gaining such an innumerable company (whose names are with his own inscribed in heaven) to that experimental knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ our Lord, which is life eternal.

END OF VOL. I.

J, McCreery, Printer, Black-Horse-Court,
London.

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