Later in his life, he was also involved in the controversies over Gallicanism and Quietism, and supported the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority.

The works of Bossuet best known to English speakers are three great orations delivered at the funerals of Queen Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I of England (1669), of her daughter Henriette, Duchess of Orléans (1670), and of the outstanding military commander le Grand Condé (1687).

At the Collège des Godrans, he gained a reputation for hard work: fellow students nicknamed him Bos suetus aratro, an "ox accustomed to the plough".

[2] His mentor there was the college's president, Nicolas Cornet,[3] the theologian whose denunciation of Antoine Arnauld at the Sorbonne in 1649 was a major episode in the Jansenist controversy.

On one celebrated occasion at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, during a dispute about extempore preaching, the 16-year-old Bossuet was called on to deliver an impromptu sermon at 11 pm.

He was plunged at once into the thick of controversy; nearly half of Metz was Protestant, and Bossuet's first appearance in print was a refutation of the Huguenot pastor Paul Ferry (1655).

Reconciling the Protestants with the Catholic Church became his dream, and for this purpose, he began to train himself carefully for the pulpit, an all-important centre of influence in a land where political assemblies were unknown and novels and newspapers scarcely born.

)[citation needed] Bossuet quickly gained a reputation as a great preacher, and by 1660, he was preaching regularly before the court in the Chapel Royal.

Ladies such as Mme de Sévigné forsook him when Bourdaloue dawned on the Paris horizon in 1669, though Fénelon and La Bruyère, two much sounder critics, refused to follow their example.

What he said of Martin Luther applied peculiarly to himself: he could fling his fury into theses and thus unite the dry light of argument with the fire and heat of passion.

[5] Bossuet was always best when at work on a large canvas; besides, here no conscientious scruples intervened to prevent him from giving much time and thought to the artistic side of his subject.

[citation needed] Bossuet's tutorial functions involved composing all the necessary books of instruction, including not just handwriting samples, but also manuals of philosophy, history, and religion fit for a future King of France.

Bossuet's conclusions are only drawn from Holy Scripture because he wished to gain the highest possible sanction for the institutions of his country and to hallow the France of Louis XIV by proving its astonishing likeness to the Israel of Solomon.

Then, too, the veil of Holy Scripture enabled him to speak out more boldly than court etiquette would have otherwise allowed, to remind the son of Louis XIV that kings have duties as well as rights.

That is what made him so stalwart a champion of authority in all its forms: "le roi, Jesus-Christ et l'Eglise, Dieu en ces trois noms" ("the king, Jesus Christ, and the Church, God in His three names"), he says in a characteristic letter.

History shows that this governance is, for the most part, indirect, exercised through certain venerable corporations, as well civil and ecclesiastical, all of which demand implicit obedience as the immediate representatives of God.

While Pascal might refer to the rise and fall of empires to Providence or chance or a little grain of sand in the English lord protectors' veins, Bossuet held fast to his principle that God works through secondary causes.

[5] With the period of the Dauphin's formal education ending in 1681, Bossuet was appointed Bishop of Meaux by the King on 2 May 1681, which was approved by Pope Innocent XI on 17 November.

In 1682, before the general Assembly of the French Clergy, he preached a great sermon on the unity of the Church and made it a magnificent plea for compromise.

The Protestant churches had thrown over this interpreter; and Bossuet had small trouble in showing that, the longer they lived, the more they varied on increasingly important points.

[11] Flaubert, in his Sottisier,[12] noted that in the 19th century, Catholic theology had varied to the point of expressing ideas on slavery diametrically opposed to those of Bossuet.

[9] Next, Protestant writers began to accumulate some alleged proofs of Rome's own variations; and here, they were backed up by Richard Simon, a priest of the Paris Oratory and the father of biblical criticism in France.

Under a veil of politely ironic circumlocutions, such as did not deceive the Bishop of Meaux, he claimed his right to interpret the Bible like any other book.

Bossuet might scribble nova, mira, falsa in the margins of his book and urge Fénelon to attack them; Malebranche politely met his threats by saying that to be refuted by such a pen would do him too much honor.

A dissertation by one Father Caffaro, an obscure Italian monk, became his excuse for writing certain, violent Maximes sur la comédie (1694), wherein he made an attack on the memory of Molière, dead more than twenty years.

[citation needed] The controversy concerned their different reactions to the opinions of Jeanne Guyon: her ideas were similar to the Quietism of Molinos, which was condemned by Pope Innocent XI in 1687.

[citation needed] Bossuet now composed Instructions sur les états d'oraison, a work that explained the Articles d'Issy in greater depth.

[citation needed] Bossuet and Fénelon thus spent the years 1697–1699 battling each other in pamphlets and letters until the Inquisition finally condemned the Maximes des Saints on 12 March 1699.

When Bossuet was chosen to be the tutor of the Dauphin, oldest child of Louis XIV, he wrote several works for the edification of his pupil, one of which was Politics Derived from the Words of Holy Scripture, a discourse on the principles of royal absolutism.

The work consists of several books which are divided into articles and propositions which lay out the nature, characteristics, duties, and resources of royalty.