Louis Ellies du Pin

At the age of twenty, he accompanied Racine, who made a visit to Nicole for the purpose of becoming reconciled to the gentlemen of Port Royal.

But, while not hostile to the Jansenists, Dupin's intellectual attraction was in another direction; he was the disciple of Jean Launoy, a learned critic and a Gallican.

In it he treated simultaneously biography, literary criticism, and the history of dogma; in this he was a pioneer leaving far behind him all previous efforts, Catholic or Protestant, which were still under the influence of the Scholastic method.

A more formidable enemy appeared in Bossuet, who, during a public thesis at the Collège de Navarre in 1692, condemned Dupin's audacity.

These concerned original sin, purgatory, the canonicity of the Sacred Scriptures, the eternity of hell's torments, the veneration of saints and of their relics, the adoration of the Cross, grace, the pope and the bishops, Lent, divorce, the celibacy of the clergy, tradition, the Eucharist, the theology of the Trinity, and the Council of Nicæa.

Like Petit-Didier, Bossuet would not admit that any of the Greek or Latin Fathers differed from St. Augustine on the subject of grace, nor that this matter could be called subtle, delicate, and abstract.

The same zeal for union induced him, during the residence of Peter the Great in France, and at that monarch's request, to draw up a plan for uniting the Greek and Roman churches.

Etienne Jordan, a contemporary who saw him, said: in "the morning he would grow pale over books and in the afternoon over cards in the pleasant company of ladies.