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Excerpt from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 46: July-December, 1839 <p>A change, however, soon becomes perceptible as we advance into the reign of Louis XV. In religion, the fervency and unction which give an appearance of inspiration to many of the compositions of Bossuet on subjects of Christian belief, were succeeded by a school of pulpit eloquence, in which morality, cha rity, or the performance of duty, were more insisted on than faith; a school analogous to that of Tillotson and Barrow and South in our own country. In Massillon, the predomi nance of action over sentiment as the great principle of religion, becomes evident while the lessons he ventures to convey to royalty as to its duties, and the corresponding rights of sub jects, contrasting so strangely with the divine-right doctrines systemati cally inculcated by Bossuet, Show that monarchy had soon begun to lose its imposing aspect under the weak suc cessor of Louis XIV., and that it was already beginning to listen to that language of remonstrance from the pulpit, which was at no distant period to be conveyed in accents of thunder from the democratic demagogues and infuriated multitudes in the courts of Versailles or the Tuileries. <p>About the Publisher <p>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com <p>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.