THE
PROVINCIAL LETTERS
OF
BLAISE PASCAL.

A NEW TRANSLATION

WITH HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,

BY

THE REV. THOMAS M‘CRIE.

EDINBURGH.

If my letters are condemned at Rome, that which I condemn in them is condemned in heaven.—Pascal.

NEW YORK:

ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS

No. 530 BROADWAY.

1856.

CONTENTS.

THE TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.

The following translation of the Provincial Letters was undertaken several years ago, in compliance with the suggestion of a revered parent, chiefly as a literary recreation in a retired country charge, and, after being finished, was laid aside. It is now published at the request of friends, who considered such a work as peculiarly seasonable, and more likely to be acceptable at the present crisis, when general attention has been again directed to the popish controversy, and when such strenuous exertions are being made by the Jesuits to regain influence in our country.

None are strangers to the fame of the Provincials, and few literary persons would choose to confess themselves altogether ignorant of a work which has acquired a world-wide reputation. Yet there is reason to suspect that few books of the same acknowledged merit have had a more limited circle of bona fide English readers. This may be ascribed, in a great measure, to the want of a good English translation. Two translations of the Provincials have already appeared in our language. The first was contemporary with the Letters themselves, and was printed at London in 1657, under the title of “Les Provinciales; or, The Mysterie of Jesuitism, discovered in certain Letters, written upon occasion of the present differences at Sorbonne, between the Jansenists and the Molinists, from January 1656 to March 1657, S. N. Displaying the corrupt Maximes and Politicks of that Society. Faithfully rendered into English. Sicut Serpentes.” Of the translation under this unpromising title, it may only be remarked, that it is probably one of the worst specimens of “rendering into English” to be met with, even during that age when little attention was paid to the art of translation. Under its uncouth phraseology, not only are the wit and spirit of the original completely shrouded, but the meaning is so disguised that the work is almost as unintelligible as it is uninteresting.

Another translation of the Letters—of which I was not aware till I had completed mine—was published in London in 1816. On discovering that a new attempt had been made to put the English public in possession of the Provincials, and that it had failed to excite any general interest, I was induced to lay aside all thoughts of publishing my version; but, after examining the modern translation, I became convinced that its failure might be ascribed to other causes than want of taste among us for the beauties and excellences of Pascal. This translation, though written in good English, bears evident marks of haste, and of want of acquaintance with the religious controversies of the time; in consequence of which, the sense and spirit of the original have been either entirely lost, or so imperfectly developed, as to render its perusal exceedingly tantalizing and unsatisfactory.

It remains for the public to judge how far the present version may have succeeded in giving a more readable and faithful transcript of the Provincial Letters. No pains, at least, have been spared to enhance its interest and insure its fidelity. Among the numerous French editions of the Letters, the basis of the following translation is that of Amsterdam, published in four volumes 12mo, 1767; with the notes of Nicole, and his prefatory History of the Provincials, which were translated from the Latin into French by Mademoiselle de Joncourt. With this and other French editions I have compared Nicole’s Latin translation, which appeared in 1658, and received the sanction of Pascal.

The voluminous notes of Nicole, however interesting they may have been at the time, and to the parties involved in the Jansenist controversy, are not, in general, of such a kind as to invite attention now; nor would a full translation even of his historical details, turning as they do chiefly on local and temporary disputes, be likely to reward the patience of the reader. So far as they were fitted to throw light on the original text, I have availed myself of these, along with other sources of information, in the marginal notes. Some of these annotations, as might be expected from a Protestant editor, are intended to correct error, or to guard against misconception.

To the full understanding of the Provincials, however, some idea of the controversies which occasioned their publication seems almost indispensable. This I have attempted to furnish in the Historical Introduction; which will also be found to contain some interesting facts, hitherto uncollected, and borrowed from a variety of authorities not generally accessible, illustrating the history of the Letters, and the parties concerned in them, with a vindication of Pascal from the charges which this work has provoked from so many quarters against him.

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
TO
THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS.
BY THE TRANSLATOR.

The Church of Rome, notwithstanding her pretensions to infallibility, has been fully as prolific in theological controversy and intestine discord as any of the Reformed Churches. She has contrived, indeed, with singular policy, to preserve, amidst all her variations, the semblance of unity. Protestantism, like the primitive Church, suffered its dissentients to fly off into hostile or independent communions. The Papacy, on the contrary, has managed to retain hers within the outward pale of her fellowship, by the institution of various religious orders, which have served as safety-valves for exuberant zeal, and which, though often hostile to each other, have remained attached to the mother Church, and even proved her most efficient supporters. Still, at different times, storms have arisen within the Romish Church, which could be quelled neither by the infallibility of popes nor the authority of councils. It is doubtful if religious controversy ever raged with so much violence in the Reformed Church, as it did between the Thomists and the Scotists, the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Jesuits and the Jansenists, of the Church of Rome.

Uninviting as they may now appear, the disputes about grace, in which the last mentioned parties were involved, gave occasion to the Provincial Letters. The origin of these disputes must be traced as far back as the days of Augustine and the Pelagian controversy of the fifth century. The motto of Pelagius was free-will; that of Augustine was efficacious grace. The former held that, notwithstanding the fall, the human will was perfectly free to choose at any time between good and evil; the latter, that in consequence of the fall, the will is in a state of moral bondage, from which it can only be freed by divine grace. With the British monk, election is suspended on the decision of man’s will; human nature is still as pure as it came originally from the hands of the Creator: Christ died equally for all men; and, as the result of his death, a general grace is granted to all mankind, which any may comply with, but which all may finally forfeit. With the African bishop, election is absolute—we are predestinated, not from foreseen holiness, but that we might be holy;[^[1]] all men are lying under the guilt or penal obligation of the first sin, and in a state of spiritual helplessness and corruption; the sacrifice of Christ was, in point of destination, offered for the elect, though, in point of exhibition, it is offered to all; and the saints obtain the gift of perseverance in holiness to the end.[^[2]]

Pelagius, whose real name was Morgan, and who is supposed to have been a Welshman, belonged to that numerous class of thinkers, who, from their peculiar idiosyncrasy, are apt to start at the sovereignty of divine grace, developed in the plan of redemption, as if it struck at once at the equity of God and the responsibility of man. He is said to have betrayed his heretical leanings, for the first time, by publicly expressing his disapprobation of a sentiment of Augustine, which he heard quoted by a bishop “Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis—Give, Lord, what thou biddest, and bid what thou wilt.” It would be easy to show that, in recoiling from the odious picture of the orthodox doctrine, drawn by his own fancy, he fell into the very consequences which he was so eager to avoid. The deity of Pelagius being subjected to the changeable will of the creature, all things were left to the direction of blind chance or unthinking destiny; while man, being represented as created with concupiscence, to account for his aberrations from rectitude—in other words, with a constitution in which the seeds of evil were implanted—the authorship of sin was ascribed, directly and primarily, to the Creator.[^[3]]

Augustine was a powerful but unsteady writer, and has expressed himself so inconsistently as to have divided the opinions of the Latin Church, where he was recognized as a standard, canonized as a saint, and revered under the title of “The Doctor of Grace.” On the great doctrine of salvation by grace, he is scriptural and evangelical; and hence he has been frequently quoted with admiration by our Reformed divines, partly to evince the declension of Rome from the faith of the earlier fathers, partly from that veneration for antiquity, which induces us to bestow more notice on the ivy-mantled ruin, than on the more graceful and commodious modern edifice in its vicinity. When arguing against Pelagianism, Augustine is strong in the panoply of Scripture; when developing his own system, he fails to do justice either to Scripture or to himself. Loud, and even fierce, for the entire corruption of human nature, he spoils all by admitting the absurd dogma of baptismal regeneration. Chivalrous in the defence of grace, as opposed to free-will, he virtually abandons the field to the enemy, by teaching that we are justified by our works of evangelical obedience, and that the faith which justifies includes in its nature all the offices of Christian charity.

During the dark ages, the Church of Rome, professing the highest veneration for St. Augustine, had ceased to hold the Augustinian theology. The Dominicans, indeed, yielded a vague allegiance to it, by adhering to the views of Thomas Aquinas, “the angelic doctor” of the schools, from whom they were termed Thomists; while the Franciscans, who opposed them, under the auspices of Duns Scotus, from whom they were termed Scotists, leaned to the views of Pelagius. The Scotists, like the modern advocates of free-will, inveighed against their opponents as fatalists, and charged them with making God the author of sin; the Thomists, again, retorted on the Scotists, by accusing them of annihilating the grace of God. But the doctrines of grace had sunk out of view, under a mass of penances, oblations, and intercessions, founded on the assumption of human merit, and on that very confusion of the forensic change in justification with the moral change in sanctification, in which Augustine had unhappily led the way. At length the Reformation appeared; and as both Luther and Calvin appealed to the authority of Augustine, when treating of grace and free-will, the Romish divines, in their zeal against the Reformers, became still more decidedly Pelagian. In the Council of Trent, the admirers of Augustine durst hardly show themselves; the Jesuits carried everything before them; and the anathemas of that synod, which were aimed at Calvin fully as much as Luther, though they professed to condemn only the less guarded statements of the German reformer, were all in favor of Pelagius.

The controversy was revived in the Latin Church, about the close of the sixteenth century, both in the Low Countries and in Spain. In 1588, Lewis Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, published lectures on “The Concord of Grace and Free-Will;” and this work, filled with the jargon of the schools, gave rise to disputes which continued to agitate the Church during the whole of the succeeding century. Molina conceived that he had discovered a method of reconciling the divine purposes with the freedom of the human will, which would settle the question forever. According to his theory, God not only foresaw from eternity all things possible, by a foresight of intelligence, and all things future by a foresight of vision; but by another kind of foresight, intermediate between these two, which he termed scientia media, or middle knowledge, he foresaw what might have happened under certain circumstances or conditions, though it never may take place. All men, according to Molina, are favored with a general grace, sufficient to work out their salvation, if they choose to improve it; but when God designs to convert a sinner, he vouchsafes that measure of grace which he foresees, according to the middle knowledge, or in all the circumstances of the case, the person will comply with. The honor of this discovery was disputed by another Jesuit, Peter Fonseca, who declared that the very same thing had burst upon his mind with all the force of inspiration, when lecturing on the subject some years before.[^[4]]

Abstruse as these questions may appear, they threatened a serious rupture in the Romish Church. The Molinists were summoned to Rome in 1598, to answer the charges of the Dominicans; and after some years of deliberation, Pope Clement VIII. decided against Molina. The Jesuits, however, alarmed for the credit of their order, never rested till they prevailed on the old pontiff to re-examine the matter; and in 1602, he appointed a grand council of cardinals, bishops, and divines, who convened for discussion no less than seventy-eight times. This council was called Congregatio de Auxiliis, or council on the aids of grace. Its records being kept secret, the result of their collective wisdom was not known with certainty, and has been lost to the world.[^[5]] The probability is, that like Milton’s “grand infernal peers,” who reasoned high on similar points,

“They found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”

Those who appealed to them for the settlement of the question, had too much reason to say, as the man in Terence does to his lawyers—“Fecistis probe; incertior sum multo quam dudum.”[^[6]]

But this interminable dispute was destined to assume a more popular form, and lead to more practical results. In 1604, two young men entered, as fellow-students, the university of Louvain, which had been distinguished for its hostility to Molinism. Widely differing in natural temperament as well as outward rank, Cornelius Jansen, who was afterwards bishop of Ypres, and John Duverger de Hauranne, afterwards known as the Abbé de St. Cyran, formed an acquaintance which soon ripened into friendship. They began to study together the works of Augustine, and to compare them with the Scriptures. The immediate result was, an agreement in opinion that the ancient father was in the right, and that the Jesuits, and other followers of Molina, were in the wrong. This was followed by an ardent desire to revive the doctrines of their favorite doctor—a task which each of them prosecuted in the way most suited to his respective character.

Jansen, or Jansenius, as he is often called,[^[7]] was descended of humble parentage, and born October 28, 1585, in a village near Leerdam, in Holland. By his friends he is extolled for his penetrating genius, tenacious memory, magnanimity, and piety. Taciturn and contemplative in his habits, he was frequently overheard, when taking his solitary walks in the garden of the monastery, to exclaim: “O veritas! veritas!—O truth! truth!” Keen in controversy, ascetic in devotion, and rigid in his Catholicism, his antipathies were about equally divided between heretics and Jesuits. Towards the Protestants, his acrimony was probably augmented by the consciousness of having embraced views which might expose himself to the suspicion of heresy; or, still more probably, by that uneasy feeling with which we cannot help regarding those who, holding the same doctrinal views with ourselves, may have made a more decided and consistent profession of them. The first supposition derives countenance from the private correspondence between him and his friend St. Cyran, which shows some dread of persecution;[^[8]] the second is confirmed by his acknowledged writings. He speaks of Protestants as no better than Turks, and gives it as his opinion that “they had much more reason to congratulate themselves on the mercy of princes, than to complain of their severities, which, as the vilest of heretics, they richly deserved.”[^[9]] His controversy with the learned Gilbert Voet led the latter to publish his Desperata Causa Papatus, one of the best exposures of the weaknesses of Popery. When to this we add that the Calvinistic synod of Dort, in 1618, had condemned Arminius and the Dutch Remonstrants as having fallen into the errors of Pelagius and Molina, the position of Jansen became still more complicated. Of Arminius he could not approve, without condemning Augustine; with the Protestant synod he could not agree, unless he chose to be denounced as a Calvinist.

But the natural enemies of Jansen were, without doubt, the Jesuits. To the history of this Society we can only now advert in a very cursory manner. It may appear surprising that an order so powerful and politic should have owed its origin to such a person as Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish soldier: and that a wound in the leg, which this hidalgo received at the battle of Pampeluna, should have issued in his becoming the founder of a Society which has embroiled the world and the Church. But in fact, Loyola, though the originator of the sect, is not entitled to the honor, or rather the disgrace, of organizing its constitution. This must be assigned to Laynez and Aquaviva, the two generals who succeeded him—men as superior to the founder of the Society in talents as he excelled them in enthusiasm. Ignatius owed his success to circumstances. While he was watching his arms as the knight-errant of the Virgin, in her chapel at Montserrat, or squatting within his cell in a state of body too noisome for human contact, and of mind verging on insanity, Luther was making Germany ring with the first trumpet-notes of the Reformation. The monasteries, in which ignorance had so long slumbered in the lap of superstition, were awakened; but their inmates were totally unfit for doing battle on the new field of strife that had opened around them. Unwittingly, in the heat of his fanaticism, the illiterate Loyola suggested a line of policy which, matured by wiser heads, proved more adapted to the times. Bred in the court and the camp, he contrived to combine the finesse of the one, and the discipline of the other, with the sanctity of a religious community; and proposed that, instead of the lazy routine of monastic life, his followers should actively devote themselves to the education of youth, the conversion of the heathen, and the suppression of heresy. Such a proposal, backed by a vow of devotion to the Holy See, commended itself to the pope so highly that, in 1540, he confirmed the institution by a bull, granted it ample privileges, and appointed Loyola to be its first general. In less than a century, this sect, which assumed to itself, with singular arrogance, the name of “The Society of Jesus,” rose to be the most enterprising and formidable order in the Romish communion.

Never was the name of the blessed Jesus more grossly prostituted than when applied to a Society which is certainly the very opposite, in spirit and character, to Him who was “meek and lowly,” “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners.” The Jesuits may be said to have invented, for their own peculiar use, an entirely new system of ethics. In place of the divine law, they prescribed, as the rule of their conduct, a “blind obedience” to the will of their superiors, whom they are bound to recognize as “standing in the place of God,” and in fulfilling whose orders they are to have no more will of their own “than a corpse, or an old man’s staff.” The glory of God they identify with the aggrandizement of their Society; and holding that “the end sanctifies the means,” they scruple at no means, foul or fair, which they conceive may advance such an end.[^[10]] The supreme power is vested in the general, who is not responsible to any other authority, civil or ecclesiastical. A system of mutual espionage, and a secret correspondence with head-quarters at Rome, in which everything that can, in the remotest degree, affect the interests of the Society is made known, and by means of which the whole machinery of Jesuitism can be set in motion at once, or its minutest feelers directed to any object at pleasure, presents the most complete system of organization in the world. Every member is sworn, by secret oath, to obey the orders, and all are confederated in a solemn league to advance the cause of the Society. It has been defined to be “a naked sword, the hilt of which is at Rome.” Such a monstrous combination could not fail to render itself obnoxious. Constantly aiming at ascendency in the Church, in which it is an imperium in imperio, the Society has not only been embroiled in perpetual feuds with the other orders, but has repeatedly provoked the thunders of the Vatican. Ever intermeddling with the affairs of civil governments, with allegiance to which, under any form, its principles are utterly at variance, it has been expelled in turn from almost every European State, as a political nuisance. But Jesuitism is the very soul of Popery; both have revived or declined together; and accordingly, though the order was abolished by Clement XIV. in 1775, it was found necessary to resuscitate it under Pius VII. in 1814; and the Society was never in greater power, nor more active operation, than it is at the present moment. It boasts of immortality, and, in all probability, it will last as long as the Church of Rome. It has been termed “a militia called out to combat the Reformation,” and exhibiting, as it does to this day, the same features of ambition, treachery, and intolerance, it seems destined to fall only in the ruins of that Church of whose unchanging spirit it is the genuine type and representative.[^[11]]

In prosecuting the ends of their institution, the Jesuits have adhered with singular fidelity to its distinguishing spirit. As the instructors of youth, their solicitude has ever been less to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge than to bar out what might prove dangerous to clerical domination; they have confined their pupils to mere literary studies, which might amuse without awakening their minds, and make them subtle dialecticians without disturbing a single prejudice of the dark ages. As missionaries, they have been much more industrious and successful in the manual labor of baptizing all nations than in teaching them the Gospel.[^[12]] As theologians, they have uniformly preferred the views of Molina; regarding these, if not as more agreeable to Scripture and right reason, at least (to use the language of a late writer) as “more consonant with the common sense and natural feelings of mankind.”[^[13]] As controversialists, they were the decided foes of all reform and all reformers, from within or without the Church. As moralists, they cultivated, as might be expected, the loosest system of casuistry, to qualify themselves for directing the consciences of high and low, and becoming, through the confessional, the virtual governors of mankind. In all these departments they have, doubtless, produced men of abilities; but the very means which they employed to aggrandize the Society have tended to dwarf the intellectual growth of its individual members: and hence, while it is true that “the Jesuits had to boast of the most vigorous controversialists, the most polite scholars, the most refined courtiers, and the most flexible casuists of their age,”[^[14]] it has been commonly remarked, that they have never produced a single great man.

Casuistry, the art in which the Jesuits so much excelled, is, strictly speaking, that branch of theology which treats of cases of conscience, and originally consisted in nothing more than an application of the general precepts of Scripture to particular cases. The ancient casuists, so long as they confined themselves to the simple rules of the Gospel, were at least harmless, and their ingenious writings are still found useful in cases of ecclesiastical discipline; but they gradually introduced into the science of morals the metaphysical jargon of the schools, and instead of aiming at making men moral, contented themselves with disputing about morality.[^[15]] The main source of the aberrations of casuistry lay in the unscriptural dogma of priestly absolution—in the right claimed by man to forgive sin, as a transgression of the law of God; and the arbitrary distinction between sins as venial and mortal—a distinction which assigns to the priest the prerogative, and imposes on him the obligation, of drawing the critical line, or fixing a kind of tariff on human actions, and apportioning penance or pardon, as the case may seem to require. In their desperate attempt to define the endless forms of depravity on which they were called to adjudicate, or which the pruriency of the cloister suggested to the imagination, the casuists sank deeper into the mire at every step; and their productions, at length, resembled the common sewers of a city, which, when exposed, become more pestiferous than the filth which they were meant to remove. Even under the best management, such a system was radically bad; in the hands of the Jesuits it became unspeakably worse. To their “modern casuists,” as they were termed, must we ascribe the invention of probabilism, mental reservation, and the direction of the intention, which have been sufficiently explained and rebuked in the Provincial Letters. We shall only remark here, that the actions to which these principles were applied were not only such as have been termed indifferent, and the criminality of which may be doubtful, or dependent on the intention of the actor: the probabilism of the Jesuits was, in fact, a systematic attempt to legalize crime, under the sanction of some grave doctor, who had found out some excuse for it; and their theory of mental reservations, and direction of the intention, was equally employed to sanctify the plainest violations of the divine law. Casuistry, it is true, has generally vibrated betwixt the extremes of impracticable severity and contemptible indulgence; but the charge against the Jesuits was, not that they softened the rigors of ascetic virtue, but that they propagated principles which sapped the foundation of all moral obligation. “They are a people,” said Boileau, “who lengthen the creed and shorten the decalogue.”

Such was the community with which the Bishop of Ypres ventured to enter the lists. Already had he incurred their resentment by opposing their interests in some political negotiations; and by publishing his “Mars Gallicus,” he had mortally offended their patron, Cardinal Richelieu; but, strange to say, his deadly sin against the Society was a posthumous work. Jansen was cut off by the plague, May 8, 1638. Shortly after his decease, his celebrated work, entitled “Augustinus,” was published by his friends Fromond and Calen, to whom he had committed it on his death-bed. To the preparation of this work he may be said to have devoted his life. It occupied him twenty-two years, during which, we are told, he had ten times read through the works of Augustine (ten volumes, folio!) and thirty times collated those passages which related to Pelagianism.[^[16]] The book itself, as the title imports, was little more than a digest of the writings of Augustine on the subject of grace.[^[17]] It was divided into three parts; the first being a refutation of Pelagianism, the second demonstrating the spiritual disease of man, and the third exhibiting the remedy provided. The sincerity of Jansen’s love to truth is beyond question, though we may be permitted to question the form in which it was evinced. The radical defect of the work is, that instead of resorting to the living fountain of inspiration, he confined himself to the cistern of tradition. Enamored with the excellences of Augustine, he adopted even his inconsistencies. With the former he challenged the Jesuits; with the latter he warded off the charge of heresy. As a controvertist, he is chargeable with prejudice, rather than dishonesty. As a reformer, he wanted the independence of mind necessary to success. Instead of standing boldly forward on the ground of Scripture, he attempted, with more prudence than wisdom, to shelter himself behind the venerable name of Augustine.

If by thus preferring the shield of tradition to the sword of the Spirit, Jansen expected to out-manœuvre the Jesuits, he had mistaken his policy. “Augustinus,” though professedly written to revive the doctrine of Augustine, was felt by the Society as, in reality, an attack upon them, under the name of Pelagians. To conscious delinquency, the language of implied censure is ever more galling than formal impeachment. Jansen’s portrait of Augustine was but too faithfully executed; and the disciples of Loyola could not fail to see how far they had departed from the faith of the ancient Church; but the discovery only served to incense them at the man who had exhibited their defection before the world. The approbation which the book received from forty learned doctors, and the rapture with which it was welcomed by the friends of the author, only added to their exasperation. The whole efforts of the Society were summoned to defeat its influence. Balked by the hand of death of their revenge on the person of the author, they vented it even on his remains. By a decree of the pope, procured through their instigation, a splendid monument, which had been erected over the grave of the learned and much-loved bishop, was completely demolished, that, in the words of his Holiness, “the memory of Jansen might perish from the earth.” It is even said that his body was torn from its resting-place, and thrown into some unknown receptacle.[^[18]] His literary remains were no less severely handled. Nicholas Cornet, a member of the Society, after incredible pains, extracted the heretical poison of “Augustinus,” in the form of seven propositions, which were afterwards reduced to five. These having been submitted to the judgment of Innocent X., were condemned by that pontiff in a bull dated 31st May, 1653. This decision, so far from restoring peace, awakened a new controversy. The Jansenists, as the admirers of Jansen now began to be named by their opponents, while they professed acquiescence in the judgment of the pope, denied that these propositions were to be found in “Augustinus.” The succeeding pope, Alexander VII., who was still more favorable to the Jesuits, declared formally, in a bull dated 1657, “that the five propositions were certainly taken from the book of Jansenius, and had been condemned in the sense of that author.” But the Jansenists were ready to meet him on this point; they replied, that a decision of this kind overstepped the limits of papal authority, and that the pope’s infallibility did not extend to a judgment of facts.[^[19]]

The reader may be curious to know something more about these famous five propositions, condemned by the pope, which, in fact, may be said to have given occasion to the Provincial Letters. They were as follows:—

1. There are divine precepts which good men, though willing, are absolutely unable to obey.

2. No person, in this corrupt state of nature, can resist the influence of divine grace.

3. In order to render human actions meritorious, or otherwise, it is not requisite that they be exempt from necessity, but only free from constraint.

4. The semi-Pelagian heresy consisted in allowing the human will to be endued with a power of resisting grace, or of complying with its influence.

5. Whoever says that Christ died or shed his blood for all mankind, is a semi-Pelagian.

The Jansenists, in their subsequent disputes on these propositions, contended that they were ambiguously expressed, and that they might be understood in three different senses—a Calvinistic, a Pelagian, and a Catholic or Augustinian sense. In the first two senses they disclaimed them, in the last they approved and defended them. Owing to the extreme aversion of the party to Calvinism, while they substantially held the same system under the name of Augustinianism, it becomes extremely difficult to convey an intelligible idea of their theological views. On the first proposition, for example, while they disclaimed what they term the Calvinistic sense, namely, that the best of men are liable to sin in all that they do, they equally disclaim the Pelagian sentiment, that all men have a general sufficient grace, at all times, for the discharge of duty, subject to free will; and they strenuously maintained that, without efficacious grace, constantly vouchsafed, we can do nothing spiritually good. In regard to the resistibility of grace, they seem to have held that the will of man might always resist the influence of grace, if it chose to do so; but that grace would effectually prevent it from so choosing. And with respect to redemption, they appear to have compromised the matter, by holding that Christ died for all, so as that all might be partakers of the grace of justification by the merits of his death; but they denied that Christ died for each man in particular, so as to secure his final salvation; in this sense, he died for the elect only.

Were this the proper place, it would be easy to show that, in the leading points of his theology, Jansen did not differ from Calvin, so much as he misunderstood Calvinism. The Calvinists, for example, never held, as they are represented in the Provincial Letters,[^[20]] “that we have not the power of resisting grace.” So far from this, they held that fallen man could not but resist the grace of God. They preferred, therefore, the term “invincible,” as applied to grace. In short, they held exactly the victrix delectatio of Augustine, by which the will of man is sweetly but effectually inclined to comply with the will of God.[^[21]] On the subject of necessity and constraint their views are precisely similar. Nor can they be considered as differing essentially in their views of the death of Christ, as these, at least, were given by Jansen, who acknowledges in his “Augustinus,” that, “according to St. Augustine, Jesus Christ did not die for all mankind.” It is certain that neither Augustine nor Jansen would have subscribed to the views of grace and redemption held by many who, in our day, profess evangelical views. Making allowance for the different position of the parties, it is very plain that the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius, Jansen and Molina, Calvin and Arminius, was substantially one and the same. At the same time, it must be granted that on the great point of justification by faith, Jansen went widely astray from the truth; and in the subsequent controversial writings of the party, especially when arguing against the Protestants, this departure became still more strongly marked, and more deplorably manifested.[^[22]]

The revenge of the Jesuits did not stop at procuring the condemnation of Jansen’s book; it aimed at his living followers. Among these none was more conspicuous for virtue and influence than the Abbé de St. Cyran, who was known to have shared his counsels, and even aided in the preparation of his obnoxious work. While Jansen labored to restore the theoretical doctrines of Augustine, St. Cyran was ambitious to reduce them to practice. In pursuance of the moral system of that father, he taught the renunciation of the world, and the total absorption of the soul in the love of God. His religious fervor led him into some extravagances. He is said to have laid some claim to a species of inspiration, and to have anticipated for the Saviour some kind of temporal dominion, in which the saints alone would be entitled to the wealth and dignities of the world.[^[23]] But his piety appears to have been sincere, and, what is more surprising, his love to the Scriptures was such that he not only lived in the daily study of them himself, but earnestly enforced it on all his disciples. He recommended them to study the Scriptures on their knees. “No means of conversion,” he would say, “can be more apostolic than the Word of God. Every word in Scripture deserves to be weighed more attentively than gold. The Scriptures were penned by a direct ray of the Holy Spirit; the fathers only by a reflex ray emanating therefrom.” His whole character and appearance corresponded with his doctrine. “His simple mortified air, and his humble garb formed a striking contrast with the awful sanctity of his countenance, and his native lofty dignity of manner.”[^[24]] Possessing that force of character by which men of strong minds silently but surely govern others, his proselytes soon increased, and he became the nucleus of a new class of reformers.

St. Cyran was soon called to preside over the renowned monastery of Port-Royal. Two houses went under this name, though forming one abbey. One of these was called Port-Royal des Champs, and was situated in a gloomy forest, about six leagues from Paris; but this having been found an unhealthy situation, the nuns were removed for some time to another house in Paris, which went under the name of Port-Royal de Paris. The Abbey of Port-Royal was one of the most ancient belonging to the order of Citeaux, having been founded by Eudes de Sully, bishop of Paris, in 1204. It was placed originally under the rigorous discipline of St. Benedict, but in course of time fell, like most other monasteries, into a state of the greatest relaxation. In 1602, a new abbess was appointed in the person of Maria Angelica Arnauld, sister of the famous Arnauld, then a mere child, scarcely eleven years old! The nuns, promising themselves a long period of unbounded liberty, rejoiced at this appointment. But their joy was not of long duration. The young abbess, at first, indeed, thought of nothing but amusement; but at the age of seventeen a change came over her spirit. A certain Capuchin, wearied, it is said, or more probably disgusted, with the monastic life, had been requested by the nuns, who were not aware of his character, to preach before them. The preacher, equally ignorant of his audience, and supposing them to be eminently pious ladies, delivered an affecting discourse, pitched on the loftiest key of devotion, which left an impression on the mind of Angelica never to be effaced. She set herself to reform her establishment, and carried it into effect with a determination and self-denial quite beyond her years. This “reformation,” so highly lauded by her panegyrists, consisted chiefly in restoring the austere discipline of St. Benedict, and other severities practised in the earlier ages, the details of which would be neither edifying nor agreeable. The substitution of coarse serge in place of linen as underclothing, and dropping melted wax on the bare arms, may be taken as specimens of the reformation introduced by Mère Angelique. In these mortifying exercises the abbess showed an example to all the rest. She chose as her dormitory the filthiest cell in the convent, a place infested with toads and vermin, in which she found the highest delight, declaring that she “seemed transported to the grotto of Bethlehem.” The same rigid denial of pleasure was extended to her food, her dress, her whole occupations. Clothed herself in the rudest dress she could procure, nothing gave her greater offence than to see in her nuns any approach to the fashions of the world, even in the adjustment of the coarse black serge, with the scarlet cross, which formed their humble apparel[^[25]]. Yet, in the midst of all this “voluntary humility,” her heart seems to have been turned mainly to the Saviour. It was Jesus Christ whom she aimed at adoring in the worship she paid to “the sacrament of the altar.” And in a book of devotion, composed by her for private use, she gave expression to sentiments too much savoring of undivided affection to Christ to escape the censure of the Church. It was dragged to light and condemned at Rome[^[26]]. There is reason to believe that, under the direction of M. de St. Cyran, her religious sentiments, as well as those of her community, became much more enlightened. Her firmness in resisting subscription to the formulary and condemning Jansen, in spite of the most cruel and unmanly persecution, and the piety and faith she manifested on her death-bed, when, in the midst of exquisite suffering, and in the absence of the rites which her persecutors denied her, she expired in the full assurance of salvation through the merits of the only Saviour, form one of the most interesting chapters in the martyrology of the Church.

But St. Cyran aimed at higher objects than the management of a nunnery. His energetic mind planned a system of education, in which, along with the elements of learning, the youth might be imbued with early piety. Attracted by his fame, several learned men, some of them of rank and fortune, fled to enjoy at Port-Royal des Champs a sacred retreat from the world. This community, which differed from a monastery in not being bound by any vows, settled in a farm adjoining the convent, called Les Granges. The names of Arnauld, D’Andilly, Nicole, Le Maitre, Sacy,[^[27]] Fontaine, Pascal, and others, have conferred immortality on the spot. The system pursued in this literary hermitage was, in many respects, deserving of praise. The time of the recluses was divided between devotional and literary pursuits, relieved by agricultural and mechanical labors. The Scriptures, and other books of devotion, were translated into the vernacular language; and the result was, the singular anomaly of a Roman Catholic community distinguished for the devout and diligent study of the Bible. Protestants they certainly were not, either in spirit or in practice. Firm believers in the infallibility of their Church, and fond devotees in the observance of her rites, they held it a point of merit to yield a blind obedience, in matters of faith, to the dogmas of Rome. None were more hostile to Protestantism. St. Cyran, it is said, would never open a Protestant book, even for the purpose of refuting it, without first making the sign of the cross on it, to exorcise the evil spirit which he believed to lurk within its pages.[^[28]] From no community did there emanate more learned apologies for Rome than from Port-Royal. Still, it must be owned, that in attachment to the doctrines of grace, so far as they went, and in the exhibition of the Christian virtues, attested by their sufferings, lives, and writings, the Port-Royalists, including under this name both the nuns and recluses, greatly surpassed many Protestant communities. Their piety, indeed, partook of the failings which have always characterized the religion of the cloister. It seems to have hovered between superstition and mysticism. Afraid to fight against the world, they fled from it; and, forgetting that our Saviour was driven into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, they retired to a wilderness to avoid temptation. Half conscious of the hollowness of the ceremonial they practised, they sought to graft on its dead stock the vitalities of the Christian faith. In their hands, penance was sublimated into the symbol of penitential sorrow, and the mass into a spiritual service, the benefit of which depended on the preparation of the heart of the worshipper. In their eyes, the priest was but a suggestive emblem of the Saviour; and to them the altar, with its crucifix and bleeding image, served only as a platform on which they might obtain a more advantageous view of Calvary. Transferring to the Church of Rome the attributes of the Church of God, and regarding her still, in spite of her eclipse and disfigurement, as of one spirit, and even of one body, with Christ, infallible and immortal, they worshipped the fond creation of their own fancy. At the same time, they attempted to revive the doctrine of religious abstraction, or the absorption of the soul in Deity, and the total renouncement of everything in the shape of sensual enjoyment, which afterwards distinguished the mystics of the Continent. Even in their literary recreations, while they acquired an elegance of style which marked a new era in the literature of France, they betrayed their ascetic spirit. Poetry was only admissible when clothed in a devotional garb. It was by stealth that Racine, who studied at Port-Royal, indulged his poetic vein in the profane pieces which afterwards gave him celebrity. And yet it is candid to admit, that the mortifications in which this amiable fraternity engaged, consisted rather in the exclusion of pleasure than the infliction of pain, and that the object aimed at in these austerities was not so much to merit heaven as to attain an ideal perfection on earth. Port-Royalism, in short, was Popery in its mildest type, as Jesuitism is Popery in its perfection; and had it been possible to present that system in a form calculated to disarm prejudice and to cover its native deformities, the task might have been achieved by the pious devotees of Les Granges. But the same merciful Providence which, for the preservation of the human species, has furnished the snake with his rattle, and taught the lion to “roar for his prey,” has so ordered it that the Romish Church should betray her real character, in order that his people might “come out of her, and not be partakers of her sins, that they receive not of her plagues.” The whole system adopted at Port-Royal was regarded, from the commencement, with extreme jealousy by the authorities of that Church; the schools were soon dispersed, and the Jesuits never rested till they had destroyed every vestige of the obnoxious establishment.

The enemies of Port-Royal have attempted to show that St. Cyran and his associates had formed a deep-laid plot for overturning the Roman Catholic faith. From time to time, down to the present day, works have appeared, under the auspices of the Jesuits, in which this charge is reiterated; and the old calumnies against the sect are revived—a periodical trampling on the ashes of the poor Jansenists (after having accomplished their ruin two hundred years ago), which reminds one of nothing so much as the significant grinning and yelling with which the modern Jews celebrate to this day the downfal of Haman the Agagite.[^[29]] In one point only could their assailants find room to question their orthodoxy—the supremacy of the pope. Here, certainly, they were led, more from circumstances than from inclination, to lean to the side of the Gallican liberties. But even Jansen himself, after spending a lifetime on his “Augustinus,” and leaving it behind him as a sacred legacy, abandoned himself and his treatise to the judgment of the pope. The following are his words, dictated by him half an hour before his death: “I feel that it will be difficult to alter anything. Yet if the Romish see should wish anything to be altered, I am her obedient son; and to that Church in which I have always lived, even to this bed of death, I will prove obedient. This is my last will.” The same sentiment is expressed by Pascal, in one of his letters. Alas! how sad is the predicament in which the Church of Rome places her conscientious votaries! Both of these excellent men were as firmly persuaded, no doubt, of the faith which they taught, as of the facts which came under their observation; and yet they held themselves bound to cast their religious convictions at the feet of a fellow-mortal, notoriously under the influence of the Jesuits, and professed themselves ready, at a signal from Rome, to renounce what they held as divine truth, and to embrace what they regarded as damnable error! A spectacle more painful and piteous can hardly be imagined than that of such men struggling between the dictates of conscience, and the night-mare of that “strong delusion,” which led them to “believe a lie.”

In every feature that distinguished the Port-Royalists, they stood opposed to the Jesuits. In theology they were antipodes—in learning they were rivals. The schools of Port-Royal already eclipsed those of the Jesuits, whose policy it has always been to monopolize education, under the pretext of charity. But the Jansenists might have been allowed to retain their peculiar tenets, had they not touched the idol of every Jesuit, “the glory of the Society,” by supplanting them in the confessional. The priests connected with Port-Royal, from their primitive simplicity of manners and severity of morals, and, above all, from their spiritual Christianity, acquired a popularity which could not fail to give mortal offence to the Society, who then ruled the councils both of the Church and the nation. Nothing less than the annihilation of the whole party would satisfy their vengeful purpose. In this nefarious design they were powerfully aided by Cardinal Richelieu, and by Louis XIV., a prince who, though yet a mere youth, was entirely under Jesuitical influence in matters of religion; and who, having resolved to extirpate Protestantism, could not well endure the existence of a sect within the Church, which seemed to favor the Reformation by exposing the corruptions of the clergy.[^[30]]

To effect their object, St. Cyran, the leader and ornament of the party, required to be disposed of. He was accused of various articles of heresy; and Cardinal Richelieu at once gratified his party resentment and saved himself the trouble of controversy, by immuring him in the dungeon of Vincennes. In this prison St. Cyran languished for five years, and survived his release only a few months, having died in October, 1643. His place, however, as leader of the Jansenist party, was supplied by one destined to annoy the Jesuits by his controversial talents fully more than his predecessor had done by his apostolic sanctity. Anthony Arnauld may be said to have been born an enemy to the Jesuits. His father, a celebrated lawyer, had distinguished himself for his opposition to the Society, and having engaged in an important law-suit against them, in which he warmly pleaded, in the name of the university, that they should be interdicted from the education of youth, and even expelled from the kingdom. Anthony, who inherited his spirit, was the youngest in a family of twenty children, and was born February 6, 1612.[^[31]] Several of them were connected with Port-Royal. His sister, as we have seen, became its abbess; and five other sisters were nuns in that establishment. He is said to have given precocious proof of his polemic turn. Busying himself, when a mere boy, with some papers in his uncle’s library, and being asked what he was about, he replied, “Don’t you see that I am helping you to refute the Hugonots?” This prognostication he certainly verified in after life. He wrote, with almost equal vehemence, against Rome, against the Jesuits, and against the Protestants. He was, for many years, the facile princeps of the party termed Jansenists; and was one of those characters who present to the public an aspect nearly the reverse of the estimate formed of them by their private friends. By the latter he is represented as the best of men, totally free from pride and passion. Judging from his physiognomy, his writings and his life, we would say the natural temper of Arnauld was austere and indomitable. Expelled from the Sorbonne, driven out of France, and hunted from place to place, he continued to fight to the last. On one occasion, wishing his friend Nicole to assist him in a new work, the latter observed, “We are now old, is it not time to rest?” “Rest!” exclaimed Arnauld, “have we not all eternity to rest in?”

Such was the character of the man who now entered the lists against the redoubtable Society. His first offence was the publication, in 1643, of a book on “Frequent Communion;” in which, while he inculcates the necessity of a spiritual preparation for the eucharist, he insinuated that the Church of Rome had a two-fold head, in the persons of Peter and Paul.[^[32]] His next was in the shape of two letters, published in 1656, occasioned by a dispute referred to in the first Provincial Letter, in which he declared that he had not been able to find the condemned propositions in Jansen, and added some opinions on grace. The first of these assertions was deemed derogatory to the holy see; the second was charged with heresy. The Jesuits, who sighed for an opportunity of humbling the obnoxious doctor, strained every nerve to procure his expulsion from the Sorbonne, or college of divinity in the university. This object they had just accomplished, and everything promised fair to secure their triumph, when another combatant unexpectedly appeared, like one of those closely-visored knights of whom we read in romance, who so opportunely enter the field at the critical moment, and with their single arm turn the tide of battle. Need we say that we allude to the author of the Provincial Letters?

Bayle commences his Life of Pascal by declaring him to be “one of the sublimest geniuses that the world ever produced.” Seldom, at least, has the world ever seen such a combination of excellences in one man. In him we are called to admire the loftiest attributes of mind with the loveliest simplicity of moral character. He is a rare example of one born with a natural genius for the exact sciences, who applied the subtlety of his mind to religious subjects, combining with the closest logic the utmost elegance of style, and crowning all with a simple and profound piety. Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont, 19th June, 1623. His family had been ennobled by Louis XI., and his father, Stephen Pascal, occupied a high post in the civil government. Blaise manifested from an early age a strong liking for the study of mathematics, and, while yet a child, made some astonishing discoveries in natural philosophy. To these studies he devoted the greater part of his life. An incident, however, which occurred in his thirty-first year—a narrow escape from sudden death—had the effect of giving an entire change to the current of his thoughts. He regarded it as a message from heaven, calling him to renounce all secular occupations, and devote himself exclusively to God. His sister and niece being nuns in Port-Royal, he was naturally led to associate with those who then began to be called Jansenists. But though he had several of the writings of the party, there can be no doubt that it was the devotion rather than the theology of Port-Royal that constituted its charm in the eyes of Pascal. His sister informs us, in her memoirs of him, that “he had never applied himself to abstruse questions in divinity.” Nor, beyond a temporary retreat to Port-Royal des Champs, and an intimacy with its leading solitaries, can he be said to have had any connection with that establishment. His fragile frame, which was the victim of complicated disease, and his feminine delicacy of spirit, unfitting him for the rough collisions of ordinary life, he found a congenial retreat amidst these literary solitudes; while, with his clear and comprehensive mind, and his genuine piety of heart, he must have sympathized with those who sought to remove from the Church corruptions which he could not fail to deplore, and to renovate the spirit of that Christianity which he loved far above any of its organized forms. His life, not unlike a perpetual miracle, is ever exciting our admiration, not unmingled, however, with pity. We see great talents enlisted in the support, not indeed of the errors of a system, but of a system of errors—we see a noble mind debilitated by superstition—we see a useful life prematurely terminating in, if not shortened by, the petty austerities and solicitudes of monasticism. Truth requires us to state, that he not only denied himself, at last, the most common comforts of life, but wore beneath his clothes a girdle of iron, with sharp points, which, as soon as he felt any pleasurable sensation, he would strike with his elbow, so as to force the points of iron more deeply into his sides. Let the Church, which taught him such folly, be responsible for it; and let us ascribe to the grace of God the patience, the meekness, the charity, and the faith, which hovered, seraph-wise, over the death-bed of expiring genius. The curate who attended him, struck with the triumph of religion over the pride of an intellect which continued to burn after it had ceased to blaze, would frequently exclaim: “He is an infant—humble and submissive as an infant!” He died on the 19th of August, 1662, aged thirty-nine years and two months.

While Arnauld’s process before the Sorbonne was in dependence, a few of his friends, among whom were Pascal and Nicole, were in the habit of meeting privately at Port-Royal, to consult on the measures they should adopt. During these conferences one of their number said to Arnauld: “Will you really suffer yourself to be condemned like a child, without saying a word, or telling the public the real state of the question?” The rest concurred, and in compliance with their solicitations, Arnauld, after some days, produced and read before them a long and serious vindication of himself. His audience listened in coolness and silence, upon which he remarked: “I see you don’t think highly of my production, and I believe you are right; but,” added he, turning himself round and addressing Pascal, “you who are young, why cannot you produce something?” The appeal was not lost upon our author; he had hitherto written almost nothing, but he engaged to try a sketch or rough draft, which they might fill up; and retiring to his room, he produced, in a few hours, instead of a sketch, the first letter to a provincial. On reading this to his assembled friends, Arnauld exclaimed, “That is excellent! that will go down; we must have it printed immediately.”

Pascal had, in fact, with the native superiority of genius, pitched on the very tone which, in a controversy of this kind, was calculated to arrest the public mind. Treating theology in a style entirely new, he brought down the subject to the comprehension of all, and translated into the pleasantries of comedy, and familiarities of dialogue, discussions which had till then been confined to the grave utterances of the school. The framework which he adopted in his first letter was exceedingly happy. A Parisian is supposed to transmit to one of his friends in the provinces an account of the disputes of the day. It is said that the provincial with whom he affected to correspond was Perrier, who had married one of his sisters. Hence arose the name of the Provincials, which was given to the rest of the letters.

This title they owe, it would appear, to a mistake of the printer; for in an advertisement prefixed to one of the early editions, it is stated that “they have been called ‘Provincials,’ because the first having been addressed without any name to a person in the country, the printer published it under the title ‘Letter written to a Provincial by one of his Friends.’” This may be regarded as an apology for the use of a term which, critically speaking, was rather unhappy. The word provincial in French, when used to signify a person residing in the provinces, was generally understood in a bad sense, as denoting an unpolished clown.[^[33]] But the title, uncouth as it is, has been canonized and made classical forever; and “The Provincials” is a phrase which it would now be fully as ridiculous to attempt to change as it could be at first to apply it to the Letters.

The most trifling particulars connected with such a publication possess an interest. The Letters, we learn, were published at first in separate stitched sheets of a quarto size; and, on account of their brevity, none of them extending to more than one sheet of eight pages, except the last three, which were somewhat longer, they were at first known by the name of the “Little Letters.” No stated time was observed in their publication. The first letter appeared January 13, 1656, being on a Wednesday; the second on January 29, being Saturday; and the rest were issued at intervals varying from a week to a month, till March 24, 1657, which is the date of the last letter in the series; the whole thus extending over the space of a year and three months.

All accounts agree in stating that the impression produced by the Provincials, on their first appearance, was quite unexampled. They were circulated in thousands in Paris and throughout France. Speaking of the first letter, Father Daniel says: “It created a fracas which filled the fathers of the Society with consternation. Never did the post-office reap greater profits; copies were despatched over the whole kingdom; and I myself, though very little known to the gentlemen of Port-Royal, received a large packet of them, post-paid, in a town of Brittany where I was then residing.” The same method was followed with the rest of the letters. The seventh found its way to Cardinal Mazarin, who laughed over it very heartily. The eighth did not appear till a month after its predecessor, apparently to keep up expectation.[^[34]] In short, everybody read the “Little Letters,” and, whatever might be their opinions of the points in dispute, all agreed in admiring the genius which they displayed. They were found lying on the merchant’s counter, the lawyer’s desk, the doctor’s table, the lady’s toilet; and everywhere they were sought for and perused with the same avidity.[^[35]] The success of the Letters in gaining their object was not less extraordinary. The Jesuits were fairly checkmated; and though they succeeded in carrying through the censure of Arnauld, the public sympathy was enlisted in his favor. The confessionals and churches of the Jesuits were deserted, while those of their opponents were crowded with admiring thousands.[^[36]] “That book alone,” says one of its bitterest enemies, “has done more for the Jansenists than the ‘Augustinus’ of Jansen, and all the works of Arnauld put together.”[^[37]] This is the more surprising when we consider that, at that time, the influence of the Jesuits was so high in the ascendant, that Arnauld had to contend with the pope, the king, the chancellor, the clergy, the Sorbonne, the universities, and the great body of the populace; and that never was Jansenism at a lower ebb, or more generally anathematized than when the first Provincial Letter appeared.

This, however, was not all. Besides having the tide of public favor turned against them, the Jesuits found themselves the objects of universal derision. The names of their favorite casuists were converted into proverbs: Escobarder came to signify the same thing with “paltering in a double sense;” Father Bauny’s grotesque maxims furnished topics for perpetual badinage; and the Jesuits, wherever they went, were assailed with inextinguishable laughter. By no other method could Pascal have so severely stung this proud and self-conceited Society. The rage into which they were thrown was extreme, and was variously expressed. At one time it found vent in calumnies and threats of vengeance. At other times they indulged in puerile lamentations. It was amusing to hear these stalwart divines, after breathing fire and slaughter against their enemies, assume the querulous tones of injured and oppressed innocence. “The persecution which the Jesuits suffer from the buffooneries of Port-Royal,” they said, “is perfectly intolerable: the wheel and the gibbet are nothing to it; it can only be compared to the torture inflicted on the ancient martyrs, who were first rubbed over with honey and then left to be stung to death by wasps and wild bees. Their tyrants have subjected them to empoisoned raillery, and the world leaves them unpitied to suffer a sweet death, more cruel in its sweetness than the bitterest punishment.”[^[38]]

The Letters were published anonymously, under the fictitious signature of Louis de Montalte, and the greatest care was taken to preserve the secret of their authorship. As on all such occasions, many were the guesses made, and the false reports circulated; but beyond the circle of Pascal’s personal friends, none knew him to be the author, nor was the fact certainly or publicly known till after his death. The following anecdote shows, however, that he was suspected, and was once very nearly discovered: After publishing the third letter, Pascal left Port-Royal des Champs, to avoid being disturbed, and took up his residence in Paris, under the name of M. de Mons, in a hotel garni, at the sign of the King of Denmark, Rue des Poiriers, exactly opposite the college of the Jesuits. Here he was joined by his brother-in-law, Perrier, who passed as the master of the house. One day Perrier received a visit from his relative, Father Frétat, a Jesuit, accompanied by a brother monk. Frétat told him that the Society suspected M. Pascal to be the author of the “Little Letters,” which were making such a noise, and advised him as a friend to prevail on his brother-in-law to desist from writing any more of them, as he might otherwise involve himself in much trouble, and even danger. Perrier thanked him for his advice, but said he was afraid it would be altogether useless, as Pascal would just reply that he could not hinder people from suspecting him, and that though he should deny it they would not believe him. The monks took their departure, much to the relief of Perrier, for at that very time several sheets of the seventh or eighth letter, newly come from the printer, were lying on the bed, where they had been placed for the purpose of drying, but, fortunately, though the curtains were only partially drawn, and one of the monks sat very close to the bed, they were not observed. Perrier ran immediately to communicate the incident to his brother-in-law, who was in an adjoining apartment; and he had reason to congratulate him on the narrow escape which he had made.[^[39]]

As Pascal proceeded, he transmitted his manuscripts to Port-Royal des Champs, where they were carefully revised and corrected by Arnauld and Nicole. Occasionally, these expert divines suggested the plans of the letters; and by them he was, beyond all doubt, furnished with most of his quotations from the voluminous writings of the casuists, which, with the exception of Escobar, he appears never to have read. We must not suppose, however, that he took these on trust, or gave himself no trouble to verify them. We shall afterwards have proof of the contrary. The first letters he composed with the rapidity of new-born enthusiasm; but the pains and mental exertion which he bestowed on the rest are almost incredible. Nicole says “he was often twenty whole days on a single letter: and some of them he recommenced seven or eight times before bringing them to their present state of perfection.”[^[40]] We are assured that he wrote over the eighteenth letter no less than thirteen times.[^[41]] Having been obliged to hasten the publication of the sixteenth, on account of a search made after it in the printing office, he apologizes for its length on the ground that “he had found no time to make it shorter.”[^[42]]

The fruits of this extraordinary elaboration appear in every letter; but what is equally remarkable, is the art with which so many detached letters, written at distant intervals, and prompted by passing events, have been so arranged as to form an harmonious whole. The first three letters refer to Arnauld’s affair; the questions of grace are but slightly touched, the main object being to interest the reader in favor of the Jansenists, and excite his contempt and indignation against their opponents. After this prelude, the fourth letter serves as a transition to the following six, in which he takes up maxims of the casuists. In the eight concluding letters he resumes the grand objects of the work—the morals of the Jesuits and the question of grace. These three parts have each their peculiar style. The first is distinguished for lively dialogue and repartee. Jacobins, Molinists, and Jansenists are brought on the stage, and speak in character, while Pascal does little more than act as reporter. In the second part, he comes into personal contact with a casuistical doctor, and extracts from him, under the pretext of desiring information, some of the weakest and worst of his maxims. At the eleventh letter, Pascal throws off his disguise, and addressing himself directly to the whole order of the Jesuits, and to their Provincial by name, he pours out his whole soul in an impetuous and impassioned torrent of declamation. From beginning to end it is a well-sustained battle, in which the weapons are only changed in order to strike the harder.

The literary merits of the Provincials have been universally acknowledged and applauded. On this point, where Pascal’s countrymen must be considered the most competent judges, we have the testimonies of the leading spirits of France. Boileau pronounced it a work that has “surpassed at once the ancients and the moderns.” Perrault has given a similar judgment: “There is more wit in these eighteen letters than in Plato’s Dialogues; more delicate and artful raillery than in those of Lucian; and more strength and ingenuity of reasoning than in the orations of Cicero. We have nothing more beautiful in this species of writing.”[^[43]] “Pascal’s style,” says the Abbé d’Artigny, “has never been surpassed, nor perhaps equalled.”[^[44]] The high encomium of Voltaire is well known: “The Provincial Letters were models of eloquence and pleasantry. The best comedies of Molière have not more wit in them than the first letters; Bossuet has nothing more sublime than the last ones.” Again, the same writer says: “The first work of genius that appeared in prose was the collection of the Provincial Letters. Examples of every species of eloquence may there be found. There is not a single word in it which, after a hundred years, has undergone the change to which all living languages are liable. We may refer to this work the era when our language became fixed. The Bishop of Luçon told me, that having asked the Bishop of Meaux what work he would wish most to have been the author of, setting his own works aside, Bossuet instantly replied, ‘The Provincial Letters.’”[^[45]] “Pascal succeeded beyond all expression,” says D’Alembert; “several of his bon-mots have become proverbial in our language, and the Provincials will be ever regarded as a model of taste and style.”[^[46]] To this day the same high eulogiums are passed on the work by the best scholars of France.[^[47]]

To these testimonies it would be superfluous to add any criticism of our own, were it not to prepare the English reader for the peculiar character of our author’s style. Pascal’s wit is essentially French. It is not the broad humor of Smollet; it is not the cool irony of Swift; far less is it the envenomed sarcasm of Junius. It is wit—the lively, polite, piquant wit of the early French school. Nothing can be finer than its spirit; but from its very fineness it is apt to evaporate in the act of transfusion into another tongue. Nothing can be more ingenious than the transitions by which the author glides insensibly from one topic to another; and in the more serious letters, we cannot fail to be struck with the mathematical precision of his reasoning. But there is a species of iteration, and a style of dovetailing his sentiments, which does not quite accord with our taste; and the foreign texture of which, in spite of every effort to the contrary, must shine through any translation.

High as the Provincials stand in the literary world, they were not suffered to pass without censure in the high places of the Church. The first effect of their publication, indeed, was to raise a storm against the casuists, whom Pascal had so effectually exposed. The curés of Paris, and afterwards the assembly of the clergy, shocked at the discovery of such a sink of corruption, the existence of which, though just beneath their feet, they never appear to have suspected, determined to institute an examination into the subject. Hitherto the tenets of the casuists, buried in huge folios, or only taught in the colleges of the Jesuits, had escaped public observation. The clergy resolved to compare the quotations of Pascal with these writings; and the result of the investigation was, that he was found to be perfectly correct, while a multitude of other maxims, equally scandalous, were dragged to light. These were condemned in a general assembly of the clergy.[^[48]] Unfortunately for the Jesuits, they had not a single writer at the time capable of conducting their vindication. Several replies to the Provincials were attempted while they were in the course of publication; but these were taken up by the redoubtable Montalte, and fairly strangled at their birth.[^[49]] Shortly after the Letters were finished, there appeared “An Apology for the Casuists,” the production of a Jesuit named Pirot, who, with a folly and frankness which proved nearly as fatal to his order as it did to himself, attempted to vindicate the worst maxims of the casuistical school. This Apology was condemned by the Sorbonne, and subsequently at Rome; its author died of chagrin, and the Jesuits fell into temporary disgrace.[^[50]]

But, with that tenaciousness of life and elasticity of limb which have ever distinguished the Society, it was not long before they rebounded from their fall and regained their feet. Unable to answer the Letters, they succeeded in obtaining, in February, 1657, their condemnation by the Parliament of Provence, by whose orders they were burnt on the pillory by the hands of the common executioner. Not content with this clumsy method of refutation, they succeeded in procuring the formal condemnation of the Provincials by a censure of the pope, Alexander VII., dated 6th September, 1657. In this decree the work is “prohibited and condemned, under the pains and censures contained in the Council of Trent, and in the index of prohibited books, and other pains and censures which it may please his holiness to ordain.” It is almost needless to say, that these sentences neither enhanced nor lessened the fame of the Provincials. It must be interesting to know what the feelings of Pascal were, on learning that this work, into which he had thrown his whole heart, and mind, and strength, and which may be said to have been at once his chef-d’œuvre and his confession of faith, had been condemned by the head of that Church which he had hitherto believed to be infallible. Warped as his fine spirit was by education, his unbending rectitude forbids the supposition that he could surrender his cherished and conscientious sentiments at the mere dictum of the pope. An incident occurred in 1661, shortly before his death, strikingly illustrative of his conscientiousness, and of the sincerity of purpose with which the Letters were written. The persecution had begun to rage against Port-Royal; one mandement after another, requiring subscription to the condemnation of Jansen, came down from the court of Rome; and the poor nuns, shrinking, on the one hand, from violating their consciences by subscribing what they believed to be an untruth, and trembling, on the other, at the consequences of disobeying their ecclesiastical superiors, were thrown into the most distressing embarrassment. Their “obstinacy,” as it was termed, only provoked their persecutors to more stringent demands. In these circumstances, even the stern Arnauld and the conscientious Nicole were tempted to make some compromise, and drew up a declaration to accompany the signature of the nuns, which they thought might save at once the truth and their consistency. To this Pascal objected, as not sufficiently clear, and as leaving it to be inferred that they condemned “efficacious grace.” He could not endure the idea of their employing an ambiguous statement, which appeared, or might be supposed by their opponents, to grant what they did not really mean to concede. The consequence was a slight and temporary dispute—not affecting principle so much as the mode of maintaining it—in which Pascal stood alone against all the members of Port-Royal. On one occasion, after exhausting his eloquence upon them without success, he was so deeply affected, that his feeble frame, laboring under headache and other disorders, sunk under the excitement, and he fell into a swoon. After recovering his consciousness, he explained the cause of his sudden illness, in answer to the affectionate inquiries of his sister: “When I saw those,” he said, “whom I regard as the persons to whom God has made known his truth, and who ought to be its champions, all giving way, I was so overcome with grief that I could stand it no longer.” Subsequent mandements, still more stringent, soon saved the poor nuns from the temptation of ambiguous submissions, and reconciled Pascal and his friends.[^[51]]

But we are fortunately furnished with his own reflections on the subject of the Provincials, in his celebrated “Thoughts on Religion:”

“I feared,” says he, “that I might have written erroneously, when I saw myself condemned; but the example of so many pious witnesses made me think differently. It is no longer allowable to write truth. If my letters are condemned at Rome, that which I condemn in them is condemned in heaven.”[^[52]]

It is only necessary to add, that Pascal continued to maintain his sentiments on this subject unchanged to the last. On his death-bed, M. Beurrier, his parish priest, administered to him the last rites of his Church, and came to learn, after having confessed him, that he was the author of the “Provincial Letters.” Full of concern at having absolved the author of a book condemned by the pope, the good priest returned, and asked him if it was true, and if he had no remorse of conscience on that account. Pascal replied, that “he could assure him, as one who was now about to give an account to God of all his actions, that his conscience gave him no trouble on that score; and that in the composition of that work he was influenced by no mad motive, but solely by regard to the glory of God and the vindication of truth, and not in the least by any passion or personal feeling against the Jesuits.” Attempts were made by Perefixe, archbishop of Paris, first to bully the priest for having absolved such an impenitent offender,[^[53]] and afterwards to force him into a false account of his penitent’s confession. It was confidently reported, on the pretended authority of the confessor, that Pascal had expressed his sorrow for having written the Provincials, and that he had condemned his friends of Port-Royal for want of due respect to papal authority. Both these allegations were afterwards distinctly refuted—the first by the written avowal of M. Beurrier, and the other by two depositions formally made by Nicole, showing that the real ground of Pascal’s brief disagreement with his friends was directly the reverse of that which had been assigned.[^[54]]

Few books have passed through more editions than the Provincials. The following, among many others, may be mentioned as French editions:—The first, in 1656, 4to; a second in 1657, 12mo; a third in 1658, 8vo; a fourth in 1659, 8vo; a fifth in 1666, 12mo; a sixth in 1667, 8vo; a seventh in 1669, 12mo; an eighth in 1689, 8vo; a ninth in 1712, 8vo; a tenth in 1767, 12mo.[^[55]] The later editions are beyond enumeration. The Letters were translated into Latin, during the lifetime of Pascal, by his intimate friend, the learned and indefatigable Nicole, under the assumed name of “William Wendrock, a Saltzburg divine.”[^[56]] Nicole, who was a complete master of Latin, has given an elegant, though somewhat free version of his friend’s work. He has frequently added to the quotations taken from the writings of the Jesuits and others; a liberty which he doubtless felt himself the more warranted to take, from the share he had in the original concoction of the Letters. Nicole’s preliminary dissertation and notes were translated by Mademoiselle de Joncourt, a lady, it is said, “possessed of talents and piety, who, to the graces peculiar to her own sex, added the accomplishments which are the ornament of ours.”[^[57]] Besides this, the Provincials have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe. Bayle informs us that he had seen an edition of them in 8vo, with four columns, containing the French, Latin, Italian, and Spanish.[^[58]] The Spanish translation, executed by Gratien Cordero of Burgos, was suppressed by order of the Inquisition.[^[59]] But all the efforts made for the suppression of the Provincials only served to promote their popularity; and their enemies found that, if they would silence, they must answer them.

Forty years elapsed after the publication of the Provincials before the Jesuits ventured on a reply. At length, in 1697, appeared an answer, entitled Entretiens de Cleandre et d’Eudoxe, sur les Lettres au Provincial. The author is known to have been Father Daniel, the historiographer of France. This learned Jesuit undertook the desperate task of refuting the Provincials, in a form somewhat resembling that of the Letters themselves, being a series of supposed conversations between two friends, aided by an abbé, “who is excessively frank and honest, one who never could bear all his life to see people imposed upon.” The dialogue is conducted with considerable spirit, but is sadly deficient in vraisemblance. The author commences with high professions of impartiality. Cleander and Eudoxus are supposed to be quite neutral—somewhat like the free-will of Molina, “in a state of perfect equilibrium, until good sense and stubborn facts turn the scale.” But, alas! the equilibrium is soon lost, without the help either of facts or of sense. The friends have hardly uttered two sentences, till they begin to talk as like two Jesuits as could well be imagined. Party rage gets the better of literary discretion; the Port-Royalists are “honest knaves,” “true hypocrites,” “villains animated with stubborn fury;” Arnauld’s “pen may be known by the gall that drops from it;” Nicole “swears like a trooper,” and as to Pascal he is all these characters in turn, while his book is “a repertory of slander,” and is “villainous in a supreme degree!”

The whole strain of Daniel’s reply corresponds with this specimen of its spirit. Avoiding the error of Pirot, and yet without renouncing the favorite dogmas of the Society, such as probabilism, equivocations, and mental reservations, which he only attempts to palliate, Father Daniel has exhausted his skill in an attack on the sincerity of Pascal. His main object is to convey the impression that the Provincials are a libel, written in bad faith, and full of altered texts and false citations. In selecting this plan of defence, the Jesuit champion evinces considerably more ingenuity than ingenuousness. He was well aware that, at the time of their publication, the Letters had been subjected to a sifting process of examination by the most clear-sighted Jesuits, who had signally failed in proving any falsifications. But he knew also, that, during the forty years that had elapsed, the writings of the casuists had fallen into disuse and contempt, mainly in consequence of the scorching which they had received from the wit and eloquence of Pascal, and that it would be now a much easier and safer task to call in question the fidelity of citations which none would give themselves the trouble of verifying. In this bold attempt to turn the tables against the Jansenists, by accusing them of chicanery and pious fraud, the very crimes which they had succeeded in establishing against their opponents, the unscrupulous Jesuit could be at no loss to find, among the voluminous writings of the casuists, some plausible grounds for his charges. At all events, he could calculate on the readiness with which certain minds, fonder of generalizing than of investigating facts, would lay hold of the mere circumstance of a book having been written in defence of his order, as sufficient to show that a great deal may be said on both sides. As to the manner in which Daniel has executed his task, it might be sufficient to say, that it has been acknowledged by the Jesuits themselves to be a failure. Even at its first appearance, great efforts were made to suppress it altogether, as likely to do more harm than good to the Society; and in their references to it afterwards, we see the disappointment which they felt. “There was lately published,” says Richelet, “an answer to the Lettres Provinciales, which professes to demolish them, but which, nevertheless, will not do them much harm. Do you ask how? The reason is, that although this answer shows the horrid injustice, the abominable slanders, and injurious falsehoods of the Provincials, against one of the most famous societies in the Church, yet these Letters have so long, by their facetious touches, got the laughers of all denominations on their side, that they have acquired a credit and authority of which it will be difficult to divest them. It must be confessed that prejudice, on this occasion, is very unjust, very cruel, and very obstinate in its verdict; since, though these Letters have been condemned by popes, bishops, and divines, and burnt by the hands of the hangman, yet they have taken such deep root in people’s minds as to bid defiance to all these powers.”[^[60]] “The reply,” says another writer, “as may be easily imagined, was not so well received as the Letters had been. Father Daniel professed to have reason and truth on his side; but his adversary had in his favor what goes much further with men, the arms of ridicule and pleasantry.”[^[61]] This, however, is a mere begging of the question. Ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat? It is quite possible that Father Daniel may be lugubriously in the wrong, and Pascal laughingly in the right. This was very triumphantly made out in the answer to Daniel’s work, which appeared in the same year with the Entretiens, under the title of “Apology for the Provincial Letters, against the last Reply of the Jesuits, entitled Conversations of Cleander and Eudoxus.” The author was Don Mathieu Petitdidier, Benedictine of the congregation of St. Vanne, who died bishop of Macra.[^[62]] In this masterly performance, the accusations of Daniel are shown to be totally groundless, his answers jesuitical and evasive, and his arguments untenable. The “Apology” was never answered, and Daniel’s work sank out of sight.

Subsequent apologists of the Jesuits have followed the line of defence adopted by Father Daniel. The continued repetition of his charges, though they have been long since disposed of, renders it necessary to advert to them. For the strict fidelity of Pascal’s citations, we have not merely the testimony of contemporary witnesses, but what will be to many a sufficient guarantee, the solemn assertion of Pascal himself. In a conversation that took place within a year of his death, and which has been preserved by his sister, he thus answers the chief articles of accusation that had been brought against the Provincials:—

“I have been asked, first, if I repented of having written the Provincial Letters? I answered that, far from repenting, if I had it to do again, I would write them yet more strongly.

“I have been asked, in the second place, why I named the authors from whom I extracted these abominable passages which I have cited? I answered, If I were in a town where there were a dozen fountains, and I knew for certain that one of them was poisoned, I should be under obligation to tell the world not to draw from that fountain; and, as it might be supposed that this was a mere fancy on my part, I should be obliged to name him who had poisoned it, rather than expose a whole city to the risk of death.

“I have been asked, thirdly, why I adopted an agreeable, jocose, and entertaining style? I answered, If I had written dogmatically, none but the learned would have read my book; and they had no need of it, knowing how the matter stood, at least as well as I did. I conceived it, therefore, my duty to write, so that my Letters might be read by women, and people in general, that they might know the danger of all those maxims and propositions which were then spread abroad, and admitted with so little hesitation.

“Finally, I have been asked, if I had myself read all the books which I quoted? I answered, No. To do this, I had need have passed the greater part of my life in reading very bad books. But I have twice read Escobar throughout; and for the others, I got several of my friends to read them; but I have never used a single passage without having read it myself in the book quoted, without having examined the case in which it is brought forward, and without having read the preceding and subsequent context, that I might not run the risk of citing that for an answer which was in fact an objection, which would have been very unjust and blamable.”[^[63]]

If this solemn declaration, emitted by one whose heart was a stranger to deceit, and whose shrewdness placed him beyond the risk of delusion, is not accepted as sufficient, we might refer to the mass of evidence collected at the time in the Factums of the curés of Paris and Rouen, to the voluminous notes of Nicole, and to the Apology of Petitdidier, in which the citations made by Pascal are authenticated with a carefulness which not only sets all suspicion at rest, but leaves a large balance of credit in the author’s favor, by showing that, so far from having reported the worst maxims of the Jesuitical school, or placed them in the most odious light of which they were susceptible, he has been extremely tender towards them. But, indeed, the truth was placed beyond all dispute, through the efforts of the celebrated Bossuet, in 1700, when, by a sentence of an assembly of the clergy of France, the morals of the Jesuits, as exhibited in their “monstrous maxims, which had been long the scandal of the Church and of Europe,” were formally condemned, and when it may be said that the Provincial Letters met at once their full vindication and their final triumph.[^[64]]

Another class of objectors, whom the Jesuits have had the good fortune to number among their apologists, are the sceptical philosophers, whose native antipathy to Jansenism, as a phase of serious religion, renders them willing to sacrifice truth for the sake of a sneer at his disciples. D’Alembert expresses his regret that Pascal did not lampoon Jesuits and Jansenists alike;[^[65]] and Voltaire, in the mere wantonness of his cynical humor, if not from a more worthless motive, has appended to his high panegyric on the Provincials, already quoted, the following qualifications: “It is true that the whole of Pascal’s book is founded upon a false principle. He has artfully charged the whole Society with the extravagant opinions of some few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits, which he might with equal ease have detected among the casuists of the Dominican and Franciscan orders; but the Jesuits alone were the persons he wanted to attack. In these Letters he endeavored to prove that they had a settled design to corrupt the morals of mankind—a design which no sect or society ever had, or ever could have. But his business was not to be right, but to entertain the public.”[^[66]] Every clause here contains a fallacy. The charge of party-spirit, insinuated throughout, is perfectly gratuitous. Never, perhaps, was any man more free from this infirmity than Pascal. That it was pure zeal for the morality of the Gospel which engaged him to take up his pen against the Jesuits, can be doubted by none but those who make it a point to call in question the reality of all religious conviction.[^[67]] Equally unfounded is the imputation of levity. Pascal was earnest in his raillery. A deep seriousness of purpose lurked under the smile of his irony. Voltaire describes himself, not the author of the Provincials, when he says that “his business was not to be right, but to entertain the public.” As to Pascal having “endeavored to prove that the Jesuits had a settled design to corrupt the morals of mankind,” we are not surprised at Father Daniel saying so; but it is unaccountable how any but a Jesuit, who professed to have read the Letters, could advance a theory so distinctly anticipated and disclaimed in the Letters themselves. “Know, then,” it is said in letter fifth, “that their object is not the corruption of manners—that is not their design. But as little is it their sole aim to reform them—that would be bad policy.”[^[68]] “Alas!” says the Jesuit, in letter sixth, “our main object, no doubt, should have been to establish no other maxims than those of the Gospel; and it is easy to see, from our rules, that if we tolerate some degree of relaxation in others, it is rather out of complaisance than design.”[^[69]] In truth, nothing is more clearly marked throughout the Letters than this distinction between the design of the Society and the tendency of its policy—a distinction which leaves very small scope for the sage apophthegm of the philosophical historian. There is some reason to think that Voltaire expressed himself in this manner, with the view of procuring the recommendation of Father Latour to enter the Academy—an object for the accomplishment of which, it is well known, he made the most unworthy concessions to the Jesuits.[^[70]]

Later critics, in speaking of the Provincials, have indulged in a similar strain of vague depreciation; as a specimen of which we might have referred to Schlegel, who talks of their being “nothing more than a master-piece of sophistry,”[^[71]] and repeats the charge of profaneness, which Pascal has so triumphantly refuted in his eleventh letter. It would be a sad waste of time to answer this ridiculous objection. Nor will it be surprising to those who know the history of Blanco White, to find him indulging in a sceptical vein on this as on other subjects. “Pascal and the Jansenist party,” he says, “accused them of systematic laxity in their moral doctrines; but the charge, I believe, though plausible in theory, was perfectly groundless in practice. The strict, unbending maxims of the Jansenists, by urging persons of all characters and tempers on to an imaginary goal of perfection, bring quickly their whole system to the decision of experience. A greater knowledge of mankind made the Jesuits more cautious in the culture of devotional feelings. They well knew that but few can prudently engage in open hostility with what, in ascetic language, is called the world.”[^[72]] The strange mixture of truth and error in this statement leaves an unfavorable impression on the mind, the fallacy of which we feel ere we have time to analyze it. It is true that nothing could be more opposite to the laxity of the Jesuits than the asceticism of Port-Royal. But it is doing injustice to Pascal to insinuate that he measured Jesuitical morality by “the strict, unbending maxims of the Jansenists;” and it is flagrantly untrue that the Jesuits merely aimed at reducing monastic enthusiasm to the standard of common sense and ordinary life. We repeat that the real charge which Pascal substantiates against them is, not that they softened the austerities of the cloister, but that they sacrificed the eternal laws of morality—not that they prudently suited their rules to men’s tempers, but that they licensed the worst passions and propensities of our nature—not that they declined urging all to forsake the world (which he never expected), but that they sought, for their own politic ends, to veil its impurities, and countenance its evil customs.

Disguising their hostility to science, under the mask of friendship to literature, the Jesuits have succeeded in making to themselves friends of many who are acquainted with them only through the medium of their writings. And it is the remarkable fact of our day, that, while on the Continent, where they are practically known, the Jesuits have enlisted against themselves the pens of its most eminent novelists, historians, and philosophers, in Protestant England it is quite the reverse. The most talented of our periodical writers have exerted all their powers to white-wash them, to paint and paper them, and set them off with ornamental designs; and where they have not dared to defend, they have tried to blunt the edge of censure against them. Following in the same line of defence, a certain class of Protestant writers, fond of historical paradox, and of appearing superior to vulgar prejudices, have volunteered to protect the Jesuits. “No man is a stranger to the fame of Pascal,” says Sir James Macintosh; “but those who may desire to form a right judgment on the contents of the Lettres Provinciales would do well to cast a glance over the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugenie, by Bouhours, a Jesuit, who has ably vindicated his order.”[^[73]] Sir James had heard, perhaps, of Father Daniel’s Entretiens de Cleandre et d’Eudoxe, but it is very evident that he had never even “cast a glance over” that book; for the work of Bouhours, which he has confounded with it, is a philological treatise, which has no reference whatever to the Provincial Letters; and yet he could say that the Jesuit “has ably vindicated his order!” Next to the art which the Jesuits have shown in smuggling themselves into places of power and trust, is that by which they have succeeded in hoodwinking the merely literary portion of society.

But, not to dwell longer on these objections, the Provincials are liable to another charge, seldomer advanced, and not so easily answered; which is, that the loose casuistical morality denounced by Pascal was not confined to the Jesuits, nor to any one of the orders of the Romish Church, much less, as Voltaire says, to “a few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits,” but was common to all the divines of that Church, and was, in fact, the native offspring and inevitable growth of the practices of confession and absolution. It is admitted that the Jesuits were mainly responsible for its preservation and propagation; that they have been the most zealous in reducing it to practice; that, even after it had incurred the anathemas of popes, bishops, and divines, and after it had been disclaimed by all the other orders of the Church, the Jesuits pertinaciously adhered to it; and that, even to this day, they have identified themselves with the worst tenets of the casuists. But Protestants writers have generally alleged, not without reason, that the corruptions of casuistical divinity may be traced from the days of Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan, whom the Church of Rome owns as authorities; that the “new casuists” merely carried the maxims of their predecessors to their legitimate conclusions; and that though condemned by some popes, the censure has been only partial, and has been more than neutralized by the condemnation of other works written against the morality of the Jesuits. Thus, in a work entitled “Guimenius Amadeus,” the author, who was the Jesuit Moya, boldly claimed the sanction of the most venerated names in favor of the modern casuists. This work, it is true, was condemned to the flames in 1680, by Pope Innocent XI., who was favorable to the Jansenists; but the Jesuits boast of having obtained other papal constitutions, reversing the judgment of that pontiff, whom they do not scruple to stigmatize with heresy.[^[74]] It cannot be denied that the Jesuits have all along succeeded in obtaining for their system the sanction of the highest authorities in the Church; while those works which undertook to advocate a purer morality were printed clandestinely, without privilege or approbation, under fictitious names of authors and printers; nor can it be forgotten that the Provincial Letters, the most powerful exposure of Jesuitical morality that ever appeared, were censured at Rome, and burnt by the hands of the executioner.[^[75]] In short, and without entering into the question so ingeniously handled by Nicole and other Jansenists, whether the modern casuists were justified in their excesses by the ancient schoolmen, it is undeniable that this is the weakest point of the Provincials, and one on which the thorough-going Jesuit occupies, on popish principles, the most advantageous ground. The disciples of Loyola constitute the very soul of the Papacy; and they must be held as the genuine exponents of that atrocious system of morals which, engendered in the privacy of the cloister during the dark ages, reached its maturity in the hands of a designing priesthood, who still find it too convenient a tool for their purposes to part with it.

There are other respects in which we cannot fail to detect, throughout these Letters, the enfeebling and embarrassing influence of Popery over the naturally ingenuous mind of the author. Among all the maxims peculiar to the Jesuits, none are more pernicious than those in which they have openly taught that disobedience to the Papal See releases subjects from their allegiance and oaths of fidelity to their sovereigns, and authorizes them to put heretical rulers to death, even by assassination.[^[76]] On this point Pascal has failed to speak out the whole truth. Whether it may have been from genuine dread of heresy, or from a wish to spare the dignity of the pope, it is easy to see the timidity, the circumspection, the delicacy with which he touches on the point of papal authority.

The Jansenists have been called the Methodists of the Church of Rome; but the term is applicable to them rather in the wide sense in which it has been applied, derisively, to those who have sought reformation or aimed at superior sanctity within the pale of an established Church, than as applied to the party now known under that designation. They disclaimed the title of Jansenists, as a nickname applied to them by their adversaries. They held themselves to be the true Catholics, the representatives of the Church as it existed down, at least, to the days of St. Bernard, whom they termed “the last of the fathers.” They ascribed a species of semi-inspiration to the early fathers of the Church. They reverenced the Scriptures, but received them at second-hand, through the medium of tradition. To be a Catholic and a Christian were with them convertible terms. Hence the horror evinced by Pascal, in his concluding letters, at the bare thought of “heresy existing in the Church.” “Embarrassed at every step,” it has been well observed, “by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, galled and oppressed by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of their Church, these good men made profession of the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them through the conflict with their atrocious enemy, ‘the Society.’ They were themselves in too many points vulnerable to close fearlessly with their adversary, and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to drive home a deadly thrust.... The Jansenists and the inmates of Port-Royal displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom; but the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the papal superstition, could spring only from a healthy form of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, and the petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not the Beast, they cringed before him; he placed his dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to France.”[^[77]]

It is the policy of the Jesuits at present, as of old, to deny, point-blank, the truthfulness of Pascal’s statements of their doctrine and policy—to reiterate the exploded charge of his having garbled his extracts—and, after affecting to join in the laugh at his pleasantry, and to forgive, for the wit’s sake, his injustice to their innocent and much-calumniated fathers, to declare that, of course, he could not himself believe the half of what he said against them, nor comprehend the profound questions of casuistry on which he presumed to argue. Under this affectation of charity, they dexterously evade Pascal’s main charges, and slyly insinuate a vindication of the heresies of which they have been convicted. Thus, in a late publication, one of their number actually attempts to vindicate the old Jesuitical doctrine of probabilism![^[78]] At the same time, they retain, with undiminished tenacity, the moral maxims which Pascal condemns. The discovery lately made of the Theology of Dens, still taught by the Jesuits in Ireland, is a proof of this; for it is nothing more than a collection of the most wicked and obscene maxims of casuistical morality. Matters are no better in France. Dr. Gilly mentions a publication issued at Lyons, in 1825, which is so bad that the reviewer says, “We cannot, we dare not copy it; it is a book to which the cases of conscience of Dr. Sanchez were purity itself.”[^[79]] The disclosures made still more recently by M. Michelet and M. Quinet, are equally startling, and will, in all probability, issue in another expulsion of the Jesuits from France.

The policy of the Society, as hitherto exhibited in the countries where they have settled, describes a regular cycle of changes. Commencing with loud professions of charity, of liberal views in politics, and of an accommodating code of morals, they succeed in gaining popularity among the non-religious, the dissipated, and the restless portion of society. Availing themselves of this, and carefully concealing, in a Protestant country, the more obnoxious parts of their creed, their next step is to plant some of the most plausible of their apostles in the principal localities, who are instructed to establish schools and seminaries on the most charitable footing, so as to ingratiate themselves with the poor, while they secure the contributions of the rich; to attack the credit of the most active and influential among the evangelical ministry; to revive old slanders against the reformers; to disseminate tracts of the most alluring description; and, when assailed in turn, to deny everything and to grant nothing. Rising by these means to power and influence, they gradually monopolize the seats of learning and the halls of theology—they glide, with noiseless steps, into closets, cabinets, and palaces—they become the dictators of the public press, the persecutors of the good, and the oppressors of all public and private liberty. At length, their treacherous designs being discovered, they rouse against themselves the storm of natural passions, which, descending on them first as the authors of the mischief, sweeps away along with them, in its headlong career, everything that bears the aspect of that active and earnest religion, under the guise of which they had succeeded in duping mankind.

What portion of this cycle they have reached among us, it is needless to demonstrate. They have evidently got beyond the first stage; and it is highly probable that, in proof of it, the present publication may elicit a more than ordinary exhibition of their skill in the science of defamation and denial. It is far from being unlikely that, at the present point of their revolution, they may find it their interest, after all the mischief that Pascal has done them, and all the ill that they have spoken against Pascal, to claim him as a good Catholic, and take advantage of the prestige of his name to insinuate, that the Church which could boast of such a man is not to be lightly esteemed. And, in fact, it requires no small exercise of caution to guard ourselves against such an illusion. It is difficult to characterize Popery as it deserves without apparent uncharitableness to individuals, such as Fenelon and Pascal, who, though members of a corrupt Church, possessed much of the spirit of true religion. But, though it would be impossible to class such eminent and pious men with an infidel cardinal or a Spanish inquisitor, it does not follow that they are free from condemnation. It has been justly remarked, that “their example has done much harm, and been only the more pernicious from their eminence and their virtues. It is difficult to calculate how much assistance their well-merited reputation has given to prop the falling cause of Popery, and to lengthen out the continuance of a delusion the most lasting and the most dangerous that has ever led mankind astray from the truth.”[^[80]] With regard to our author, in particular, it may be well to remember, that he was virtuous without being indebted to his Church, and evangelical in spite of his creed; that his piety, for which he is so much esteemed by us, was the very quality that exposed him to odium and suspicion from his own communion; that the truths, for his adherence to which we would claim him as a brother in Christ, were those which were reprobated by the authorities of Rome; and that the following Letters, for which he is so justly admired, were, by the same Church, formally censured and ignominiously burnt, along with the Bible which Pascal loved, and the martyrs who have suffered for “the truth as it is in Jesus.”

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

LETTER I.

DISPUTES IN THE SORBONNE, AND THE INVENTION OF PROXIMATE POWER—A TERM EMPLOYED BY THE JESUITS TO PROCURE THE CENSURE OF M. ARNAULD.

Paris, January 23, 1656.

Sir,—We were entirely mistaken. It was only yesterday that I was undeceived. Until that time I had labored under the impression that the disputes in the Sorbonne were vastly important, and deeply affected the interests of religion. The frequent convocations of an assembly so illustrious as that of the Theological Faculty of Paris, attended by so many extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances, led one to form such high expectations, that it was impossible to help coming to the conclusion that the subject was most extraordinary. You will be greatly surprised, however, when you learn from the following account, the issue of this grand demonstration, which, having made myself perfectly master of the subject, I shall be able to tell you in very few words.

Two questions, then, were brought under examination; the one a question of fact, the other a question of right.

The question of fact consisted in ascertaining whether M. Arnauld was guilty of presumption, for having asserted in his second letter[^[81]] that he had carefully perused the book of Jansenius, and that he had not discovered the propositions condemned by the late pope; but that, nevertheless, as he condemned these propositions wherever they might occur, he condemned them in Jansenius, if they were really contained in that work.[^[82]]

The question here was, if he could, without presumption, entertain a doubt that these propositions were in Jansenius, after the bishops had declared that they were.

The matter having been brought before the Sorbonne, seventy-one doctors undertook his defence, maintaining that the only reply he could possibly give to the demands made upon him in so many publications, calling on him to say if he held that these propositions were in that book, was, that he had not been able to find them, but that if they were in the book, he condemned them in the book.

Some even went a step farther, and protested that, after all the search they had made into the book, they had never stumbled upon these propositions, and that they had, on the contrary, found sentiments entirely at variance with them. They then earnestly begged that, if any doctor present had discovered them, he would have the goodness to point them out; adding, that what was so easy could not reasonably be refused, as this would be the surest way to silence the whole of them, M. Arnauld included; but this proposal has been uniformly declined. So much for the one side.

On the other side are eighty secular doctors, and some forty mendicant friars, who have condemned M. Arnauld’s proposition, without choosing to examine whether he has spoken truly or falsely—who, in fact, have declared, that they have nothing to do with the veracity of his proposition, but simply with its temerity.

Besides these, there were fifteen who were not in favor of the censure, and who are called Neutrals.

Such was the issue of the question of fact, regarding which, I must say, I give myself very little concern. It does not affect my conscience in the least whether M. Arnauld is presumptuous, or the reverse; and should I be tempted, from curiosity, to ascertain whether these propositions are contained in Jansenius, his book is neither so very rare nor so very large as to hinder me from reading it over from beginning to end, for my own satisfaction, without consulting the Sorbonne on the matter.

Were it not, however, for the dread of being presumptuous myself, I really think that I would be disposed to adopt the opinion which has been formed by the most of my acquaintances, who, though they have believed hitherto on common report that the propositions were in Jansenius, begin now to suspect the contrary, owing to this strange refusal to point them out—a refusal, the more extraordinary to me, as I have not yet met with a single individual who can say that he has discovered them in that work. I am afraid, therefore, that this censure will do more harm than good, and that the impression which it will leave on the minds of all who know its history will be just the reverse of the conclusion that has been come to. The truth is, the world has become sceptical of late, and will not believe things till it sees them. But, as I said before, this point is of very little moment, as it has no concern with religion.[^[83]]

The question of right, from its affecting the faith, appears much more important, and, accordingly, I took particular pains in examining it. You will be relieved, however, to find that it is of as little consequence as the former.

The point of dispute here, was an assertion of M. Arnauld’s in the same letter, to the effect, “that the grace without which we can do nothing, was wanting to St. Peter at his fall.” You and I supposed that the controversy here would turn upon the great principles of grace; such as, whether grace is given to all men? or, if it is efficacious of itself? But we were quite mistaken. You must know I have become a great theologian within this short time; and now for the proofs of it!

To ascertain the matter with certainty, I repaired to my neighbor, M. N——, doctor of Navarre, who, as you are aware, is one of the keenest opponents of the Jansenists, and my curiosity having made me almost as keen as himself, I asked him if they would not formally decide at once that “grace is given to all men,” and thus set the question at rest. But he gave me a sore rebuff, and told me that that was not the point; that there were some of his party who held that grace was not given to all; that the examiners themselves had declared, in a full assembly of the Sorbonne, that that opinion was problematical; and that he himself held the same sentiment, which he confirmed by quoting to me what he called that celebrated passage of St. Augustine: “We know that grace is not given to all men.”

I apologized for having misapprehended his sentiment, and requested him to say if they would not at least condemn that other opinion of the Jansenists which is making so much noise, “That grace is efficacious of itself, and invincibly determines our will to what is good.” But in this second query I was equally unfortunate. “You know nothing about the matter,” he said; “that is not a heresy—it is an orthodox opinion; all the Thomists[^[84]] maintain it; and I myself have defended it in my Sorbonic thesis.”[^[85]]

I did not venture again to propose my doubts, and yet I was as far as ever from understanding where the difficulty lay; so, at last, in order to get at it, I begged him to tell me where, then, lay the heresy of M. Arnauld’s proposition? “It lies here,” said he, “that he does not acknowledge that the righteous have the power of obeying the commandments of God, in the manner in which we understand it.”

On receiving this piece of information, I took my leave of him; and, quite proud at having discovered the knot of the question, I sought M. N——, who is gradually getting better, and was sufficiently recovered to conduct me to the house of his brother-in-law, who is a Jansenist, if ever there was one, but a very good man notwithstanding. Thinking to insure myself a better reception, I pretended to be very high on what I took to be his side, and said: “Is it possible that the Sorbonne has introduced into the Church such an error as this, ‘that all the righteous have always the power of obeying the commandments of God?’”

“What say you?” replied the doctor. “Call you that an error—a sentiment so Catholic that none but Lutherans and Calvinists impugn it?”

“Indeed!” said I, surprised in my turn; “so you are not of their opinion?”

“No,” he replied; “we anathematize it as heretical and impious.”[^[86]]

Confounded by this reply, I soon discovered that I had overacted the Jansenist, as I had formerly overdone the Molinist.[^[87]] But not being sure if I had rightly understood him, I requested him to tell me frankly if he held “that the righteous have always a real power to observe the divine precepts?” Upon this the good man got warm (but it was with a holy zeal), and protested that he would not disguise his sentiments on any consideration—that such was, indeed, his belief, and that he and all his party would defend it to the death, as the pure doctrine of St. Thomas, and of St. Augustine their master.

This was spoken so seriously as to leave me no room for doubt; and under this impression I returned to my first doctor, and said to him, with an air of great satisfaction, that I was sure there would be peace in the Sorbonne very soon; that the Jansenists were quite at one with them in reference to the power of the righteous to obey the commandments of God; that I could pledge my word for them, and could make them seal it with their blood.

“Hold there!” said he. “One must be a theologian to see the point of this question. The difference between us is so subtle, that it is with some difficulty we can discern it ourselves—you will find it rather too much for your powers of comprehension. Content yourself, then, with knowing that it is very true the Jansenists will tell you that all the righteous have always the power of obeying the commandments; that is not the point in dispute between us; but mark you, they will not tell you that that power is proximate. That is the point.”

This was a new and unknown word to me. Up to this moment I had managed to understand matters, but that term involved me in obscurity; and I verily believe that it has been invented for no other purpose than to mystify. I requested him to give me an explanation of it, but he made a mystery of it, and sent me back, without any further satisfaction, to demand of the Jansenists if they would admit this proximate power. Having charged my memory with the phrase (as to my understanding, that was out of the question), I hastened with all possible expedition, fearing that I might forget it, to my Jansenist friend, and accosted him, immediately after our first salutations, with: “Tell me, pray, if you admit the proximate power?” He smiled, and replied, coldly: “Tell me yourself in what sense you understand it, and I may then inform you what I think of it.” As my knowledge did not extend quite so far, I was at a loss what reply to make; and yet, rather than lose the object of my visit, I said at random: “Why, I understand it in the sense of the Molinists.” “To which of the Molinists do you refer me?” replied he, with the utmost coolness. I referred him to the whole of them together, as forming one body, and animated by one spirit.

“You know very little about the matter,” returned he. “So far are they from being united in sentiment, that some of them are diametrically opposed to each other. But, being all united in the design to ruin M. Arnauld, they have resolved to agree on this term proximate, which both parties might use indiscriminately, though they understand it diversely, that thus, by a similarity of language, and an apparent conformity, they may form a large body, and get up a majority to crush him with the greater certainty.”

This reply filled me with amazement; but without imbibing these impressions of the malicious designs of the Molinists, which I am unwilling to believe on his word, and with which I have no concern, I set myself simply to ascertain the various senses which they give to that mysterious word proximate. “I would enlighten you on the subject with all my heart,” he said; “but you would discover in it such a mass of contrariety and contradiction, that you would hardly believe me. You would suspect me. To make sure of the matter, you had better learn it from some of themselves; and I shall give you some of their addresses. You have only to make a separate visit to one called M. le Moine,[^[88]] and to Father Nicolai.”[^[89]]

“I have no acquaintance with any of these persons,” said I.

“Let me see, then,” he replied, “if you know any of those whom I shall name to you; they all agree in sentiment with M. le Moine.”

I happened, in fact, to know some of them.

“Well, let us see if you are acquainted with any of the Dominicans whom they call the ‘New Thomists,’[^[90]] for they are all the same with Father Nicolai.”

I knew some of them also whom he named; and, resolved to profit by this counsel, and to investigate the matter, I took my leave of him, and went immediately to one of the disciples of M. le Moine. I begged him to inform me what it was to have the proximate power of doing a thing.

“It is easy to tell you that,” he replied; “it is merely to have all that is necessary for doing it in such a manner that nothing is wanting to performance.”

“And so,” said I, “to have the proximate power of crossing a river, for example, is to have a boat, boatmen, oars, and all the rest, so that nothing is wanting?”

“Exactly so,” said the monk.

“And to have the proximate power of seeing,” continued I, “must be to have good eyes and the light of day; for a person with good sight in the dark would not have the proximate power of seeing, according to you, as he would want the light, without which one cannot see?”

“Precisely,” said he.

“And consequently,” returned I, “when you say that all the righteous have the proximate power of observing the commandments of God, you mean that they have always all the grace necessary for observing them, so that nothing is wanting to them on the part of God.”

“Stay there,” he replied; “they have always all that is necessary for observing the commandments, or at least for asking it of God.”

“I understand you,” said I; “they have all that is necessary for praying to God to assist them, without requiring any new grace from God to enable them to pray.”

“You have it now,” he rejoined.

“But is it not necessary that they have an efficacious grace, in order to pray to God?”

“No,” said he; “not according to M. le Moine.”

To lose no time, I went to the Jacobins,[^[91]] and requested an interview with some whom I knew to be New Thomists, and I begged them to tell me what “proximate power” was. “Is it not,” said I, “that power to which nothing is wanting in order to act?”

“No,” said they.

“Indeed! fathers,” said I; “if anything is wanting to that power, do you call it proximate? Would you say, for instance, that a man in the night time, and without any light, had the proximate power of seeing?”

“Yes, indeed, he would have it, in our opinion, if he is not blind.”

“I grant that,” said I; “but M. le Moine understands it in a different manner.”

“Very true,” they replied; “but so it is that we understand it.”

“I have no objections to that,” I said; “for I never quarrel about a name, provided I am apprized of the sense in which it is understood. But I perceive from this, that when you speak of the righteous having always the proximate power of praying to God, you understand that they require another supply for praying, without which they will never pray.”

“Most excellent!” exclaimed the good fathers, embracing me; “exactly the thing; for they must have, besides, an efficacious grace bestowed upon all, and which determines their wills to pray; and it is heresy to deny the necessity of that efficacious grace in order to pray.”

“Most excellent!” cried I, in return; “but, according to you, the Jansenists are Catholics, and M. le Moine a heretic; for the Jansenists maintain that, while the righteous have power to pray, they require nevertheless an efficacious grace; and this is what you approve. M. le Moine, again, maintains that the righteous may pray without efficacious grace; and this is what you condemn.”

“Ay,” said they; “but M. le Moine calls that power proximate power.”

“How now! fathers,” I exclaimed; “this is merely playing with words, to say that you are agreed as to the common terms which you employ, while you differ with them as to the sense of these terms.”

The fathers made no reply; and at this juncture, who should come in but my old friend the disciple of M. le Moine! I regarded this at the time as an extraordinary piece of good fortune; but I have discovered since then that such meetings are not rare—that, in fact, they are constantly mixing in each other’s society.[^[92]]

“I know a man,” said I, addressing myself to M. le Moine’s disciple, “who holds that all the righteous have always the power of praying to God, but that, notwithstanding this, they will never pray without an efficacious grace which determines them, and which God does not always give to all the righteous. Is he a heretic?”

“Stay,” said the doctor; “you might take me by surprise. Let us go cautiously to work. Distinguo.[^[93]] If he call that power proximate power, he will be a Thomist, and therefore a Catholic; if not, he will be a Jansenist, and therefore a heretic.”

“He calls it neither proximate nor non-proximate,” said I.

“Then he is a heretic,” quoth he; “I refer you to these good fathers if he is not.”

I did not appeal to them as judges, for they had already nodded assent; but I said to them: “He refuses to admit that word proximate, because he can meet with nobody who will explain it to him.”

Upon this one of the fathers was on the point of offering his definition of the term, when he was interrupted by M. le Moine’s disciple, who said to him: “Do you mean, then, to renew our broils? Have we not agreed not to explain that word proximate, but to use it on both sides without saying what it signifies?” To this the Jacobin gave his assent.

I was thus let into the whole secret of their plot; and rising to take my leave of them, I remarked: “Indeed, fathers, I am much afraid this is nothing better than pure chicanery; and whatever may be the result of your convocations, I venture to predict that, though the censure should pass, peace will not be established. For though it should be decided that the syllables of that word proximate should be pronounced, who does not see that, the meaning not being explained, each of you will be disposed to claim the victory? The Jacobins will contend that the word is to be understood in their sense; M. le Moine will insist that it must be taken in his; and thus there will be more wrangling about the explanation of the word than about its introduction. For, after all, there would be no great danger in adopting it without any sense, seeing it is through the sense only that it can do any harm. But it would be unworthy of the Sorbonne and of theology to employ equivocal and captious terms without giving any explanation of them. In short, fathers, tell me, I entreat you, for the last time, what is necessary to be believed in order to be a good Catholic?”

“You must say,” they all vociferated simultaneously, “that all the righteous have the proximate power, abstracting from it all sense—from the sense of the Thomists and the sense of other divines.”

“That is to say,” I replied, in taking leave of them, “that I must pronounce that word to avoid being the heretic of a name. For, pray, is this a Scripture word?” “No,” said they. “Is it a word of the Fathers, the Councils, or the Popes?” “No.” “Is the word, then, used by St. Thomas?” “No.” “What necessity, therefore, is there for using it, since it has neither the authority of others nor any sense of itself?” “You are an opinionative fellow,” said they; “but you shall say it, or you shall be a heretic, and M. Arnauld into the bargain; for we are the majority, and should it be necessary, we can bring a sufficient number of Cordeliers[^[94]] into the field to carry the day.”

On hearing this solid argument, I took my leave of them, to write you the foregoing account of my interview, from which you will perceive that the following points remain undisputed and uncondemned by either party. First, That grace is not given to all men. Second, That all the righteous have always the power of obeying the divine commandments. Third, That they require, nevertheless, in order to obey them, and even to pray, an efficacious grace, which invincibly determines their will. Fourth, That this efficacious grace is not always granted to all the righteous, and that it depends on the pure mercy of God. So that, after all, the truth is safe, and nothing runs any risk but that word without the sense, proximate.

Happy the people who are ignorant of its existence!—happy those who lived before it was born!—for I see no help for it, unless the gentlemen of the Academy,[^[95]] by an act of absolute authority, banish that barbarous term, which causes so many divisions, from beyond the precincts of the Sorbonne. Unless this be done, the censure appears certain; but I can easily see that it will do no other harm than diminish the credit[^[96]] of the Sorbonne, and deprive it of that authority which is so necessary to it on other occasions.

Meanwhile, I leave you at perfect liberty to hold by the word proximate or not, just as you please; for I love you too much to persecute you under that pretext. If this account is not displeasing to you, I shall continue to apprize you of all that happens.—I am, &c.

LETTER II.

OF SUFFICIENT GRACE.

Paris, January 29, 1656.

Sir,—Just as I had sealed up my last letter, I received a visit from our old friend M. N——. Nothing could have happened more luckily for my curiosity; for he is thoroughly informed in the questions of the day, and is completely in the secret of the Jesuits, at whose houses, including those of their leading men, he is a constant visitor. After having talked over the business which brought him to my house, I asked him to state, in a few words, what were the points in dispute between the two parties.

He immediately complied, and informed me that the principal points were two—the first about the proximate power, and the second about sufficient grace. I have enlightened you on the first of these points in my former letter, and shall now speak of the second.

In one word, then, I found that their difference about sufficient grace may be defined thus: The Jesuits maintain that there is a grace given generally to all men, subject in such a way to free-will that the will renders it efficacious or inefficacious at its pleasure, without any additional aid from God, and without wanting anything on his part in order to acting effectively; and hence they term this grace sufficient, because it suffices of itself for action. The Jansenists, on the other hand, will not allow that any grace is actually sufficient which is not also efficacious; that is, that all those kinds of grace which do not determine the will to act effectively are insufficient for action; for they hold that a man can never act without efficacious grace.

Such are the points in debate between the Jesuits and the Jansenists; and my next object was to ascertain the doctrine of the New Thomists.[^[97]] “It is rather an odd one,” he said; “they agree with the Jesuits in admitting a sufficient grace given to all men; but they maintain, at the same time, that no man can act with this grace alone, but that, in order to this, he must receive from God an efficacious grace which really determines his will to the action, and which God does not grant to all men.” “So that, according to this doctrine,” said I, “this grace is sufficient without being sufficient.” “Exactly so,” he replied; “for if it suffices, there is no need of anything more for acting; and if it does not suffice, why—it is not sufficient.”

“But,” asked I, “where, then, is the difference between them and the Jansenists?” “They differ in this,” he replied, “that the Dominicans have this good qualification, that they do not refuse to say that all men have the sufficient grace.” “I understand you,” returned I; “but they say it without thinking it; for they add that, in order to action, we must have an efficacious grace which is not given to all; consequently, if they agree with the Jesuits in the use of a term which has no sense, they differ from them, and coincide with the Jansenists in the substance of the thing.” “That is very true,” said he. “How, then,” said I, “are the Jesuits united with them? and why do they not combat them as well as the Jansenists, since they will always find powerful antagonists in these men, who, by maintaining the necessity of the efficacious grace which determines the will, will prevent them from establishing that grace which they hold to be of itself sufficient?”

“The Dominicans are too powerful,” he replied, “and the Jesuits are too politic, to come to an open rupture with them. The Society is content with having prevailed on them so far as to admit the name of sufficient grace, though they understand it in another sense; by which manœuvre they gain this advantage, that they will make their opinion appear untenable, as soon as they judge it proper to do so. And this will be no difficult matter; for, let it be once granted that all men have the sufficient graces, nothing can be more natural than to conclude, that the efficacious grace is not necessary to action—the sufficiency of the general grace precluding the necessity of all others. By saying sufficient we express all that is necessary for action; and it will serve little purpose for the Dominicans to exclaim that they attach another sense to the expression; the people, accustomed to the common acceptation of that term, would not even listen to their explanation. Thus the Society gains a sufficient advantage from the expression which has been adopted by the Dominicans, without pressing them any further; and were you but acquainted with what passed under Popes Clement VIII. and Paul V., and knew how the Society was thwarted by the Dominicans in the establishment of the sufficient grace, you would not be surprised to find that it avoids embroiling itself in quarrels with them, and allows them to hold their own opinion, provided that of the Society is left untouched; and more especially, when the Dominicans countenance its doctrine, by agreeing to employ, on all public occasions, the term sufficient grace.

“The Society,” he continued, “is quite satisfied with their complaisance. It does not insist on their denying the necessity of efficacious grace; this would be urging them too far. People should not tyrannize over their friends; and the Jesuits have gained quite enough. The world is content with words; few think of searching into the nature of things; and thus the name of sufficient grace being adopted on both sides, though in different senses, there is nobody, except the most subtle theologians, who ever dreams of doubting that the thing signified by that word is held by the Jacobins as well as by the Jesuits; and the result will show that these last are not the greatest dupes.”[^[98]]

I acknowledged that they were a shrewd class of people, these Jesuits; and, availing myself of his advice, I went straight to the Jacobins, at whose gate I found one of my good friends, a staunch Jansenist (for you must know I have got friends among all parties), who was calling for another monk, different from him whom I was in search of. I prevailed on him, however, after much entreaty, to accompany me, and asked for one of my New Thomists. He was delighted to see me again. “How now! my dear father,” I began, “it seems it is not enough that all men have a proximate power, with which they can never act with effect; they must have besides this a sufficient grace, with which they can act as little. Is not that the doctrine of your school?” “It is,” said the worthy monk; “and I was upholding it this very morning in the Sorbonne. I spoke on the point during my whole half-hour; and but for the sand-glass, I bade fair to have reversed that wicked proverb, now so current in Paris: ‘He votes without speaking, like a monk in the Sorbonne.’”[^[99]] “What do you mean by your half-hour and your sand-glass?” I asked; “do they cut your speeches by a certain measure?” “Yes,” said he, “they have done so for some days past.” “And do they oblige you to speak for half an hour?” “No; we may speak as little as we please.” “But not as much as you please,” said I. “O what a capital regulation for the boobies! what a blessed excuse for those who have nothing worth the saying! But, to return to the point, father; this grace given to all men is sufficient, is it not?” “Yes,” said he. “And yet it has no effect without efficacious grace?” “None whatever,” he replied. “And all men have the sufficient,” continued I, “and all have not the efficacious?” “Exactly,” said he. “That is,” returned I, “all have enough of grace, and all have not enough of it—that is, this grace suffices, though it does not suffice—that is, it is sufficient in name, and insufficient in effect! In good sooth, father, this is particularly subtle doctrine! Have you forgotten, since you retired to the cloister, the meaning attached, in the world you have quitted, to the word sufficient?—don’t you remember that it includes all that is necessary for acting? But no, you cannot have lost all recollection of it; for, to avail myself of an illustration which will come home more vividly to your feelings, let us suppose that you were supplied with no more than two ounces of bread and a glass of water daily, would you be quite pleased with your prior were he to tell you that this would be sufficient to support you, under the pretext that, along with something else, which, however, he would not give you, you would have all that would be necessary to support you? How, then, can you allow yourselves to say that all men have sufficient grace for acting, while you admit that there is another grace absolutely necessary to acting which all men have not? Is it because this is an unimportant article of belief, and you leave all men at liberty to believe that efficacious grace is necessary or not, as they choose? Is it a matter of indifference to say, that with sufficient grace a man may really act?” “How!” cried the good man; “indifference!—it is heresy—formal heresy. The necessity of efficacious grace for acting effectively, is a point of faith—it is heresy to deny it.”

“Where are we now?” I exclaimed; “and which side am I to take here? If I deny the sufficient grace, I am a Jansenist. If I admit it, as the Jesuits do, in the way of denying that efficacious grace is necessary, I shall be a heretic, say you. And if I admit it, as you do, in the way of maintaining the necessity of efficacious grace, I sin against common sense, and am a blockhead, say the Jesuits. What must I do, thus reduced to the inevitable necessity of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist? And what a sad pass are matters come to, if there are none but the Jansenists who avoid coming into collision either with the faith or with reason, and who save themselves at once from absurdity and from error!”

My Jansenist friend took this speech as a good omen, and already looked upon me as a convert. He said nothing to me, however; but, addressing the monk: “Pray, father,” inquired he, “what is the point on which you agree with the Jesuits?” “We agree in this,” he replied, “that the Jesuits and we acknowledge the sufficient grace given to all.” “But,” said the Jansenist, “there are two things in this expression sufficient grace—there is the sound, which is only so much breath; and there is the thing which it signifies, which is real and effectual. And, therefore, as you are agreed with the Jesuits in regard to the word sufficient, and opposed to them as to the sense, it is apparent that you are opposed to them in regard to the substance of that term, and that you only agree with them as to the sound. Is this what you call acting sincerely and cordially?”

“But,” said the good man, “what cause have you to complain, since we deceive nobody by this mode of speaking? In our schools we openly teach that we understand it in a manner different from the Jesuits.”

“What I complain of,” returned my friend, “is, that you do not proclaim it everywhere, that by sufficient grace you understand the grace which is not sufficient. You are bound in conscience, by thus altering the sense of the ordinary terms of theology, to tell that, when you admit a sufficient grace in all men, you understand that they have not sufficient grace in effect. All classes of persons in the world understand the word sufficient in one and the same sense; the New Thomists alone understand it in another sense. All the women, who form one-half of the world, all courtiers, all military men, all magistrates, all lawyers, merchants, artisans, the whole populace—in short, all sorts of men, except the Dominicans, understand the word sufficient to express all that is necessary. Scarcely any one is aware of this singular exception. It is reported over the whole earth, simply that the Dominicans hold that all men have the sufficient graces. What other conclusion can be drawn from this, than that they hold that all men have all the graces necessary for action; especially when they are seen joined in interest and intrigue with the Jesuits, who understand the thing in that sense? Is not the uniformity of your expressions, viewed in connection with this union of party, a manifest indication and confirmation of the uniformity of your sentiments?

“The multitude of the faithful inquire of theologians: What is the real condition of human nature since its corruption? St. Augustine and his disciples reply, that it has no sufficient grace until God is pleased to bestow it. Next come the Jesuits, and they say that all have the effectually sufficient graces. The Dominicans are consulted on this contrariety of opinion; and what course do they pursue? They unite with the Jesuits; by this coalition they make up a majority; they secede from those who deny these sufficient graces; they declare that all men possess them. Who, on hearing this, would imagine anything else than that they gave their sanction to the opinion of the Jesuits? And then they add that, nevertheless, these said sufficient graces are perfectly useless without the efficacious, which are not given to all!

“Shall I present you with a picture of the Church amidst these conflicting sentiments? I consider her very like a man who, leaving his native country on a journey, is encountered by robbers, who inflict many wounds on him, and leave him half dead. He sends for three physicians resident in the neighboring towns. The first, on probing his wounds, pronounces them mortal, and assures him that none but God can restore to him his lost powers. The second, coming after the other, chooses to flatter the man—tells him that he has still sufficient strength to reach his home; and, abusing the first physician who opposed his advice, determines upon his ruin. In this dilemma, the poor patient, observing the third medical gentleman at a distance, stretches out his hands to him as the person who should determine the controversy. This practitioner, on examining his wounds, and ascertaining the opinions of the first two doctors, embraces that of the second, and uniting with him, the two combine against the first, and being the stronger party in number, drive him from the field in disgrace. From this proceeding, the patient naturally concludes that the last comer is of the same opinion with the second; and, on putting the question to him, he assures him most positively that his strength is sufficient for prosecuting his journey. The wounded man, however, sensible of his own weakness, begs him to explain to him how he considered him sufficient for the journey. ‘Because,’ replies his adviser, ‘you are still in possession of your legs, and legs are the organs which naturally suffice for walking.’ ‘But,’ says the patient, ‘have I all the strength necessary to make use of my legs? for, in my present weak condition, it humbly appears to me that they are wholly useless.’ ‘Certainly you have not,’ replies the doctor; ‘you will never walk effectively, unless God vouchsafes some extraordinary assistance to sustain and conduct you.’ ‘What!’ exclaims the poor man, ‘do you not mean to say that I have sufficient strength in me, so as to want for nothing to walk effectively?’ ‘Very far from it,’ returns the physician. ‘You must, then,’ says the patient, ‘be of a different opinion from your companion there about my real condition.’ ‘I must admit that I am,’ replies the other.

“What do you suppose the patient said to this? Why, he complained of the strange conduct and ambiguous terms of this third physician. He censured him for taking part with the second, to whom he was opposed in sentiment, and with whom he had only the semblance of agreement, and for having driven away the first doctor, with whom he in reality agreed; and, after making a trial of his strength, and finding by experience his actual weakness, he sent them both about their business, recalled his first adviser, put himself under his care, and having, by his advice, implored from God the strength of which he confessed his need, obtained the mercy he sought, and, through divine help, reached his house in peace.”

The worthy monk was so confounded with this parable that he could not find words to reply. To cheer him up a little, I said to him, in a mild tone: “But, after all, my dear father, what made you think of giving the name of sufficient to a grace which you say it is a point of faith to believe is, in fact, insufficient?” “It is very easy for you to talk about it,” said he. “You are an independent and private man; I am a monk, and in a community—cannot you estimate the difference between the two cases? We depend on superiors; they depend on others. They have promised our votes—what would you have to become of me?” We understood the hint; and this brought to our recollection the case of his brother monk, who, for a similar piece of indiscretion, has been exiled to Abbeville.

“But,” I resumed, “how comes it about that your community is bound to admit this grace?” “That is another question,” he replied. “All that I can tell you is, in one word, that our order has defended, to the utmost of its ability, the doctrine of St. Thomas on efficacious grace. With what ardor did it oppose, from the very commencement, the doctrine of Molina? How did it labor to establish the necessity of the efficacious grace of Jesus Christ? Don’t you know what happened under Clement VIII. and Paul V., and how the former having been prevented by death, and the latter hindered by some Italian affairs from publishing his bull, our arms still sleep in the Vatican? But the Jesuits, availing themselves, since the introduction of the heresy of Luther and Calvin, of the scanty light which the people possess for discriminating between the error of these men and the truth of the doctrine of St. Thomas, disseminated their principles with such rapidity and success, that they became, ere long, masters of the popular belief; while we, on our part, found ourselves in the predicament of being denounced as Calvinists, and treated as the Jansenists are at present, unless we qualified the efficacious grace with, at least, the apparent avowal of a sufficient.[^[100]] In this extremity, what better course could we have taken for saving the truth, without losing our own credit, than by admitting the name of sufficient grace, while we denied that it was such in effect? Such is the real history of the case.”

This was spoken in such a melancholy tone, that I really began to pity the man; not so, however, my companion. “Flatter not yourselves,” said he to the monk, “with having saved the truth; had she not found other defenders, in your feeble hands she must have perished. By admitting into the Church the name of her enemy, you have admitted the enemy himself. Names are inseparable from things. If the term sufficient grace be once established, it will be vain for you to protest that you understand by it a grace which is not sufficient. Your protest will be held inadmissible. Your explanation would be scouted as odious in the world, where men speak more ingenuously about matters of infinitely less moment. The Jesuits will gain a triumph—it will be their grace, which is sufficient, in fact, and not yours, which is only so in name, that will pass as established; and the converse of your creed will become an article of faith.”

“We will all suffer martyrdom first,” cried the father, “rather than consent to the establishment of sufficient grace in the sense of the Jesuits. St. Thomas, whom we have sworn to follow even to the death, is diametrically opposed to such doctrine.”[^[101]]

To this my friend, who took up the matter more seriously than I did, replied: “Come now, father, your fraternity has received an honor which it sadly abuses. It abandons that grace which was confided to its care, and which has never been abandoned since the creation of the world. That victorious grace, which was waited for by the patriarchs, predicted by the prophets, introduced by Jesus Christ, preached by St. Paul, explained by St. Augustine, the greatest of the fathers, embraced by his followers, confirmed by St. Bernard, the last of the fathers,[^[102]] supported by St. Thomas, the angel of the schools,[^[103]] transmitted by him to your order, maintained by so many of your fathers, and so nobly defended by your monks under popes Clement and Paul—that efficacious grace, which had been committed as a sacred deposit into your hands, that it might find, in a sacred and everlasting order, a succession of preachers, who might proclaim it to the end of time—is discarded and deserted for interests the most contemptible. It is high time for other hands to arm in its quarrel. It is time for God to raise up intrepid disciples of the Doctor of grace,[^[104]] who, strangers to the entanglements of the world, will serve God for God’s sake. Grace may not, indeed, number the Dominicans among her champions, but champions she shall never want; for, by her own almighty energy, she creates them for herself. She demands hearts pure and disengaged; nay, she herself purifies and disengages them from worldly interests, incompatible with the truths of the Gospel. Reflect seriously on this, father; and take care that God does not remove this candlestick from its place, leaving you in darkness, and without the crown, as a punishment for the coldness which you manifest to a cause so important to his Church.”[^[105]]

He might have gone on in this strain much longer, for he was kindling as he advanced, but I interrupted him by rising to take my leave, and said: “Indeed, my dear father, had I any influence in France, I should have it proclaimed, by sound of trumpet: ‘Be it known to all men, that when the Jacobins SAY that sufficient grace is given to all, they MEAN that all have not the grace which actually suffices!’ After which, you might say it as often as you please, but not otherwise.” And thus ended our visit.

You will perceive, therefore, that we have here a politic sufficiency somewhat similar to proximate power. Meanwhile I may tell you, that it appears to me that both the proximate power and this same sufficient grace may be safely doubted by anybody, provided he is not a Jacobin.[^[106]]

I have just come to learn, when closing my letter, that the censure[^[107]] has passed. But as I do not yet know in what terms it is worded, and as it will not be published till the 15th of February, I shall delay writing you about it till the next post.—I am, &c.

REPLY OF THE “PROVINCIAL” TO THE FIRST TWO LETTERS OF HIS FRIEND.

February 2, 1656.

Sir,—Your two letters have not been confined to me. Everybody has seen them, everybody understands them, and everybody believes them. They are not only in high repute among theologians—they have proved agreeable to men of the world, and intelligible even to the ladies.

In a communication which I lately received from one of the gentlemen of the Academy—one of the most illustrious names in a society of men who are all illustrious—who had seen only your first letter, he writes me as follows: “I only wish that the Sorbonne, which owes so much to the memory of the late cardinal,[^[108]] would acknowledge the jurisdiction of his French Academy. The author of the letter would be satisfied; for, in the capacity of an academician, I would authoritatively condemn, I would banish, I would proscribe—I had almost said exterminate—to the extent of my power, this proximate power, which makes so much noise about nothing, and without knowing what it would have. The misfortune is, that our academic ‘power’ is a very limited and remote power. I am sorry for it; and still more sorry that my small power cannot discharge me from my obligations to you,” &c.

My next extract is from the pen of a lady, whom I shall not indicate in any way whatever. She writes thus to a female friend who had transmitted to her the first of your letters: “You can have no idea how much I am obliged to you for the letter you sent me—it is so very ingenious, and so nicely written. It narrates, and yet it is not a narrative; it clears up the most intricate and involved of all possible matters; its raillery is exquisite; it enlightens those who know little about the subject, and imparts double delight to those who understand it. It is an admirable apology; and, if they would so take it, a delicate and innocent censure. In short, that letter displays so much art, so much spirit, and so much judgment, that I burn with curiosity to know who wrote it,” &c.

You too, perhaps, would like to know who the lady is that writes in this style; but you must be content to esteem without knowing her; when you come to know her, your esteem will be greatly enhanced.

Take my word for it, then, and continue your letters; and let the censure come when it may, we are quite prepared for receiving it. These words, “proximate power,” and “sufficient grace,” with which we are threatened, will frighten us no longer. We have learned from the Jesuits, the Jacobins, and M. le Moine, in how many different ways they may be turned, and how little solidity there is in these new-fangled terms, to give ourselves any trouble about them.—Meanwhile, I remain, &c.

LETTER III.

INJUSTICE, ABSURDITY, AND NULLITY OF THE CENSURE ON M. ARNAULD.

Paris, February 9, 1656.

Sir,—I have just received your letter; and, at the same time, there was brought me a copy of the censure in manuscript. I find that I am as well treated in the former, as M. Arnauld is ill-treated in the latter. I am afraid there is some extravagance in both cases, and that neither of us is sufficiently well known by our judges. Sure I am, that were we better known, M. Arnauld would merit the approval of the Sorbonne, and I the censure of the Academy. Thus our interests are quite at variance with each other. It is his interest to make himself known, to vindicate his innocence; whereas it is mine to remain in the dark, for fear of forfeiting my reputation. Prevented, therefore, from showing my face, I must devolve on you the task of making my acknowledgments to my illustrious admirers, while I undertake that of furnishing you with the news of the censure.

I assure you, sir, it has filled me with astonishment. I expected to find it condemning the most shocking heresy in the world, but your wonder will equal mine, when informed that these alarming preparations, when on the point of producing the grand effect anticipated, have all ended in smoke.

To understand the whole affair in a pleasant way, only recollect, I beseech you, the strange impressions which, for a long time past, we have been taught to form of the Jansenists. Recall to mind the cabals, the factions, the errors, the schisms, the outrages, with which they have been so long charged; the manner in which they have been denounced and vilified from the pulpit and the press; and the degree to which this torrent of abuse, so remarkable for its violence and duration, has swollen of late years, when they have been openly and publicly accused of being not only heretics and schismatics, but apostates and infidels—with “denying the mystery of transubstantiation, and renouncing Jesus Christ and the Gospel.”[^[109]]

After having published these startling[^[110]] accusations, it was resolved to examine their writings, in order to pronounce judgment on them. For this purpose the second letter of M. Arnauld, which was reported to be full of the greatest errors,[^[111]] is selected. The examiners appointed are his most open and avowed enemies. They employ all their learning to discover something that they might lay hold upon, and at length they produce one proposition of a doctrinal character, which they exhibit for censure.

What else could any one infer from such proceedings, than that this proposition, selected under such remarkable circumstances, would contain the essence of the blackest heresies imaginable. And yet the proposition so entirely agrees with what is clearly and formally expressed in the passages from the fathers quoted by M. Arnauld, that I have not met with a single individual who could comprehend the difference between them. Still, however, it might be imagined that there was a very great difference; for the passages from the fathers being unquestionably catholic, the proposition of M. Arnauld, if heretical, must be widely opposed[^[112]] to them.

Such was the difficulty which the Sorbonne was expected to clear up. All Christendom waited, with wide-opened eyes, to discover, in the censure of these learned doctors, the point of difference which had proved imperceptible to ordinary mortals. Meanwhile M. Arnauld gave in his defences, placing his own proposition and the passages of the fathers from which he had drawn it in parallel columns, so as to make the agreement between them apparent to the most obtuse understandings.

He shows, for example, that St. Augustine says in one passage, that “Jesus Christ points out to us, in the person of St. Peter, a righteous man warning us by his fall to avoid presumption.” He cites another passage from the same father, in which he says, “that God, in order to show us that without grace we can do nothing, left St. Peter without grace.” He produces a third, from St. Chrysostom, who says, “that the fall of St. Peter happened, not through any coldness towards Jesus Christ, but because grace failed him; and that he fell, not so much through his own negligence as through the withdrawment of God, as a lesson to the whole Church, that without God we can do nothing.” He then gives his own accused proposition, which is as follows: “The fathers point out to us, in the person of St. Peter, a righteous man to whom that grace without which we can do nothing, was wanting.”

In vain did people attempt to discover how it could possibly be, that M. Arnauld’s expression differed from those of the fathers as much as truth from error, and faith from heresy. For where was the difference to be found? Could it be in these words, “that the fathers point out to us, in the person of St. Peter, a righteous man?” St. Augustine has said the same thing in so many words. Is it because he says “that grace had failed him?” The same St. Augustine, who had said that “St. Peter was a righteous man,” says “that he had not had grace on that occasion.” Is it, then, for his having said, “that without grace we can do nothing?” Why, is not this just what St. Augustine says in the same place, and what St. Chrysostom had said before him, with this difference only, that he expresses it in much stronger language, as when he says “that his fall did not happen through his own coldness or negligence, but through the failure of grace, and the withdrawment of God?”[^[113]]

Such considerations as these kept everybody in a state of breathless suspense, to learn in what this diversity could consist, when at length, after a great many meetings, this famous and long-looked for censure made its appearance. But, alas! it has sadly baulked our expectation. Whether it be that the Molinist doctors would not condescend so far as to enlighten us on the point, or for some other mysterious reason, the fact is, they have done nothing more than pronounce these words: “This proposition is rash, impious, blasphemous, accursed, and heretical!”

Would you believe it, sir, that most people, finding themselves deceived in their expectations, have got into bad humor, and begin to fall foul upon the censors themselves? They are drawing strange inferences from their conduct in favor of M. Arnauld’s innocence. “What!” they are saying, “is this all that could be achieved, during all this time, by so many doctors joining in a furious attack on one individual? Can they find nothing in all his works worthy of reprehension, but three lines, and these extracted, word for word, from the greatest doctors of the Greek and Latin Churches? Is there any author whatever whose writings, were it intended to ruin him, would not furnish a more specious pretext for the purpose? And what higher proof could be furnished of the orthodoxy of this illustrious accused?

“How comes it to pass,” they add, “that so many denunciations are launched in this censure, into which they have crowded such terms as ‘poison, pestilence, horror, rashness, impiety, blasphemy, abomination, execration, anathema, heresy’—the most dreadful epithets that could be used against Arius, or Antichrist himself; and all to combat an imperceptible heresy, and that, moreover, without telling us what it is? If it be against the words of the fathers that they inveigh in this style, where is the faith and tradition? If against M. Arnauld’s proposition, let them point out the difference between the two; for we can see nothing but the most perfect harmony between them. As soon as we have discovered the evil of the proposition, we shall hold it in abhorrence; but so long as we do not see it, or rather see nothing in the statement but the sentiments of the holy fathers, conceived and expressed in their own terms, how can we possibly regard it with any other feelings than those of holy veneration?”

Such is a specimen of the way in which they are giving vent to their feelings. But these are by far too deep-thinking people. You and I, who make no pretensions to such extraordinary penetration, may keep ourselves quite easy about the whole affair. What! would we be wiser than our masters? No: let us take example from them, and not undertake what they have not ventured upon. We would be sure to get boggled in such an attempt. Why it would be the easiest thing imaginable, to render this censure itself heretical. Truth, we know, is so delicate, that if we make the slightest deviation from it, we fall into error; but this alleged error is so extremely fine-spun, that, if we diverge from it in the slightest degree, we fall back upon the truth. There is positively nothing between this obnoxious proposition and the truth but an imperceptible point. The distance between them is so impalpable, that I was in terror lest, from pure inability to perceive it, I might, in my over-anxiety to agree with the doctors of the Sorbonne, place myself in opposition to the doctors of the Church. Under this apprehension, I judged it expedient to consult one of those who, through policy, was neutral on the first question, that from him I might learn the real state of the matter. I have accordingly had an interview with one of the most intelligent of that party, whom I requested to point out to me the difference between the two things, at the same time frankly owning to him that I could see none.

He appeared to be amused at my simplicity, and replied, with a smile: “How simple it is in you to believe that there is any difference! Why, where could it be? Do you imagine that, if they could have found out any discrepancy between M. Arnauld and the fathers, they would not have boldly pointed it out, and been delighted with the opportunity of exposing it before the public, in whose eyes they are so anxious to depreciate that gentleman?”

I could easily perceive, from these few words, that those who had been neutral on the first question, would not all prove so on the second; but anxious to hear his reasons, I asked: “Why, then, have they attacked this unfortunate proposition?”

“Is it possible,” he replied, “you can be ignorant of these two things, which I thought had been known to the veriest tyro in these matters?—that, on the one hand, M. Arnauld has uniformly avoided advancing a single tenet which is not powerfully supported by the tradition of the Church; and that, on the other hand, his enemies have determined, cost what it may, to cut that ground from under him; and, accordingly, that as the writings of the former afforded no handle to the designs of the latter, they have been obliged, in order to satiate their revenge, to seize on some proposition, it mattered not what, and to condemn it without telling why or wherefore. Do not you know how the Jansenists keep them in check, and annoy them so desperately, that they cannot drop the slightest word against the principles of the fathers without being incontinently overwhelmed with whole volumes, under the pressure of which they are forced to succumb? So that, after a great many proofs of their weakness, they have judged it more to the purpose, and much less troublesome, to censure than to reply—it being a much easier matter with them to find monks than reasons.”[^[114]]

“Why then,” said I, “if this be the case, their censure is not worth a straw; for who will pay any regard to it, when they see it to be without foundation, and refuted, as it no doubt will be, by the answers given to it?”

“If you knew the temper of people,” replied my friend the doctor, “you would talk in another sort of way. Their censure, censurable as it is, will produce nearly all its designed effect for a time; and although, by the force of demonstration, it is certain that, in course of time, its invalidity will be made apparent, it is equally true that, at first, it will tell as effectually on the minds of most people as if it had been the most righteous sentence in the world. Let it only be cried about the streets: ‘Here you have the censure of M. Arnauld!—here you have the condemnation of the Jansenists!’ and the Jesuits will find their account in it. How few will ever read it! How few of them who do read, will understand it! How few will observe that it answers no objections! How few will take the matter to heart, or attempt to sift it to the bottom?—Mark then, how much advantage this gives to the enemies of the Jansenists. They are sure to make a triumph of it, though a vain one, as usual, for some months at least—and that is a great matter for them—they will look out afterwards for some new means of subsistence. They live from hand to mouth, sir. It is in this way they have contrived to maintain themselves down to the present day. Sometimes it is by a catechism in which a child is made to condemn their opponents; then it is by a procession, in which sufficient grace leads the efficacious in triumph; again it is by a comedy, in which Jansenius is represented as carried off by devils; at another time it is by an almanac; and now it is by this censure.”[^[115]]

“In good sooth,” said I, “I was on the point of finding fault with the conduct of the Molinists; but after what you have told me, I must say I admire their prudence and their policy. I see perfectly well that they could not have followed a safer or more judicious course.”

“You are right,” returned he; “their safest policy has always been to keep silent; and this led a certain learned divine to remark, ‘that the cleverest among them are those who intrigue much, speak little, and write nothing.’

“It is on this principle that, from the commencement of the meetings, they prudently ordained that, if M. Arnauld came into the Sorbonne, it must be simply to explain what he believed, and not to enter the lists of controversy with any one. The examiners having ventured to depart a little from this prudent arrangement, suffered for their temerity. They found themselves rather too vigorously[^[116]] refuted by his second apology.

“On the same principle, they had recourse to that rare and very novel device of the half-hour and the sand-glass.[^[117]] By this means they rid themselves of the importunity of those troublesome doctors,[^[118]] who might undertake to refute all their arguments, to produce books which might convict them of forgery, to insist on a reply, and reduce them to the predicament of having none to give.

“It is not that they were so blind as not to see that this encroachment on liberty, which has induced so many doctors to withdraw from the meetings, would do no good to their censure; and that the protest of nullity, taken on this ground by M. Arnauld before it was concluded, would be a bad preamble for securing it a favorable reception. They know very well that unprejudiced persons place fully as much weight on the judgment of seventy doctors, who had nothing to gain by defending M. Arnauld, as on that of a hundred others who had nothing to lose by condemning him. But, upon the whole, they considered that it would be of vast importance to have a censure, although it should be the act of a party only in the Sorbonne, and not of the whole body; although it should be carried with little or no freedom of debate, and obtained by a great many small manœuvres not exactly according to order; although it should give no explanation of the matter in dispute; although it should not point out in what this heresy consists, and should say as little as possible about it, for fear of committing a mistake. This very silence is a mystery in the eyes of the simple; and the censure will reap this singular advantage from it, that they may defy the most critical and subtle theologians to find in it a single weak argument.

“Keep yourself easy, then, and do not be afraid of being set down as a heretic, though you should make use of the condemned proposition. It is bad, I assure you, only as occurring in the second letter of M. Arnauld. If you will not believe this statement on my word, I refer you to M. le Moine, the most zealous of the examiners, who, in the course of conversation with a doctor of my acquaintance this very morning, on being asked by him where lay the point of difference in dispute, and if one would no longer be allowed to say what the fathers had said before him, made the following exquisite reply: ‘This proposition would be orthodox in the mouth of any other—it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that the Sorbonne have condemned it!’ You must now be prepared to admire the machinery of Molinism, which can produce such prodigious overturnings in the Church—that what is catholic in the fathers becomes heretical in M. Arnauld—that what is heretical in the Semi-Pelagians becomes orthodox in the writings of the Jesuits; the ancient doctrine of St. Augustine becomes an intolerable innovation, and new inventions, daily fabricated before our eyes, pass for the ancient faith of the Church.” So saying, he took his leave of me.

This information has satisfied my purpose. I gather from it that this same heresy is one of an entirely new species. It is not the sentiments of M. Arnauld that are heretical; it is only his person. This is a personal heresy. He is not a heretic for anything he has said or written, but simply because he is M. Arnauld. This is all they have to say against him. Do what he may, unless he cease to be, he will never be a good Catholic. The grace of St. Augustine will never be the true grace, so long as he continues to defend it. It would become so at once, were he to take it into his head to impugn it. That would be a sure stroke, and almost the only plan for establishing the truth and demolishing Molinism; such is the fatality attending all the opinions which he embraces.

Let us leave them, then, to settle their own differences. These are the disputes of theologians, not of theology. We, who are no doctors, have nothing to do with their quarrels. Tell our friends the news of the censure, and love me while I am, &c.[^[119]]

LETTER IV.

ON ACTUAL GRACE AND SINS OF IGNORANCE.

Paris, February 25, 1656.

Sir,—Nothing can come up to the Jesuits. I have seen Jacobins, doctors, and all sorts of people in my day, but such an interview as I have just had was wanting to complete my knowledge of mankind. Other men are merely copies of them. As things are always found best at the fountainhead, I paid a visit to one of the ablest among them, in company with my trusty Jansenist—the same who accompanied me to the Dominicans. Being particularly anxious to learn something of a dispute which they have with the Jansenists about what they call actual grace, I said to the worthy father that I would be much obliged to him if he would instruct me on this point—that I did not even know what the term meant, and would thank him to explain it. “With all my heart,” the Jesuit replied; “for I dearly love inquisitive people. Actual grace, according to our definition, ‘is an inspiration of God, whereby he makes us to know his will, and excites within us a desire to perform it.’”

“And where,” said I, “lies your difference with the Jansenists on this subject?”

“The difference lies here,” he replied; “we hold that God bestows actual grace on all men in every case of temptation; for we maintain, that unless a person have, whenever tempted, actual grace to keep him from sinning, his sin, whatever it may be, can never be imputed to him. The Jansenists, on the other hand, affirm that sins, though committed without actual grace, are, nevertheless, imputed; but they are a pack of fools.” I got a glimpse of his meaning; but, to obtain from him a fuller explanation, I observed: “My dear father, it is that phrase actual grace that puzzles me; I am quite a stranger to it, and if you would have the goodness to tell me the same thing over again, without employing that term, you would infinitely oblige me.”

“Very good,” returned the father; “that is to say, you want me to substitute the definition in place of the thing defined; that makes no alteration on the sense; I have no objections. We maintain it, then, as an undeniable principle, that an action cannot be imputed as a sin, unless God bestow on us, before committing it, the knowledge of the evil that is in the action, and an inspiration inciting us to avoid it. Do you understand me now?”

Astonished at such a declaration, according to which, no sins of surprise, nor any of those committed in entire forgetfulness of God, could be imputed, I turned round to my friend the Jansenist, and easily discovered from his looks that he was of a different way of thinking. But as he did not utter a word, I said to the monk, “I would fain wish, my dear father, to think that what you have now said is true, and that you have good proofs for it.”

“Proofs, say you!” he instantly exclaimed: “I shall furnish you with these very soon, and the very best sort too; let me alone for that.”

So saying, he went in search of his books, and I took this opportunity of asking my friend if there was any other person who talked in this manner? “Is this so strange to you?” he replied. “You may depend upon it that neither the fathers, nor the popes, nor councils, nor Scripture, nor any book of devotion, employ such language; but if you wish casuists and modern schoolmen, he will bring you a goodly number of them on his side.” “O! but I care not a fig about these authors, if they are contrary to tradition,” I said. “You are right,” he replied.

As he spoke, the good father entered the room, laden with books; and presenting to me the first that came to hand, “Read that,” he said; “this is ‘The Summary of Sins,’ by Father Bauny[^[120]]—the fifth edition too, you see, which shows that it is a good book.”

“It is a pity, however,” whispered the Jansenist in my ear, “that this same book has been condemned at Rome, and by the bishops of France.”

“Look at page 906,” said the father. I did so, and read as follows: “In order to sin and become culpable in the sight of God, it is necessary to know that the thing we wish to do is not good, or at least to doubt that it is—to fear or to judge that God takes no pleasure in the action which we contemplate, but forbids it; and in spite of this, to commit the deed, leap the fence, and transgress.”

“This is a good commencement,” I remarked. “And yet,” said he, “mark how far envy will carry some people. It was on that very passage that M. Hallier, before he became one of our friends, bantered Father Bauny, by applying to him these words: Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi—‘Behold the man that taketh away the sins of the world!’”

“Certainly,” said I, “according to Father Bauny, we may be said to behold a redemption of an entirely new description.”

“Would you have a more authentic witness on the point?” added he. “Here is the book of Father Annat.[^[121]] It is the last that he wrote against M. Arnauld. Turn up to page 34, where there is a dog’s ear, and read the lines which I have marked with pencil—they ought to be written in letters of gold.” I then read these words: “He that has no thought of God, nor of his sins, nor any apprehension (that is, as he explained it, any knowledge) of his obligation to exercise the acts of love to God or contrition, has no actual grace for exercising those acts; but it is equally true that he is guilty of no sin in omitting them, and that, if he is damned, it will not be as a punishment for that omission.” And a few lines below, he adds: “The same thing may be said of a culpable commission.”

“You see,” said the monk, “how he speaks of sins of omission and of commission. Nothing escapes him. What say you to that?”

“Say!” I exclaimed. “I am delighted! What a charming train of consequences do I discover flowing from this doctrine! I can see the whole results already; and such mysteries present themselves before me! Why, I see more people, beyond all comparison, justified by this ignorance and forgetfulness of God, than by grace and the sacraments![^[122]] But, my dear father, are you not inspiring me with a delusive joy? Are you sure there is nothing here like that sufficiency which suffices not? I am terribly afraid of the Distinguo;—I was taken in with that once already! Are you quite in earnest?”

“How now!” cried the monk, beginning to get angry; “here is no matter for jesting. I assure you there is no such thing as equivocation here.”

“I am not making a jest of it,” said I; “but that is what I really dread, from pure anxiety to find it true.”[^[123]]

“Well then,” he said, “to assure yourself still more of it, here are the writings of M. le Moine,[^[124]] who taught the doctrine in a full meeting of the Sorbonne. He learned it from us, to be sure; but he has the merit of having cleared it up most admirably. O how circumstantially he goes to work! He shows that, in order to make out an action to be a sin, all these things must have passed through the mind. Read, and weigh every word.”—I then read what I now give you in a translation from the original Latin: “1. On the one hand, God sheds abroad on the soul some measure of love, which gives it a bias toward the thing commanded; and on the other, a rebellious concupiscence solicits it in the opposite direction. 2. God inspires the soul with a knowledge of its own weakness. 3. God reveals the knowledge of the physician who can heal it. 4. God inspires it with a desire to be healed. 5. God inspires a desire to pray and solicit his assistance.”

“And unless all these things occur and pass through the soul,” added the monk, “the action is not properly a sin, and cannot be imputed, as M. le Moine shows in the same place and in what follows. Would you wish to have other authorities for this? Here they are.”

“All modern ones, however,” whispered my Jansenist friend.

“So I perceive,” said I to him aside; and then, turning to the monk: “O my dear sir,” cried I, “what a blessing this will be to some persons of my acquaintance! I must positively introduce them to you. You have never, perhaps, met with people who had fewer sins to account for all your life. For, in the first place, they never think of God at all; their vices have got the better of their reason; they have never known either their weakness or the physician who can cure it; they have never thought of ‘desiring the health of their soul,’ and still less of ‘praying to God to bestow it;’ so that, according to M. le Moine, they are still in the state of baptismal innocence. They have ‘never had a thought of loving God or of being contrite for their sins;’ so that, according to Father Annat, they have never committed sin through the want of charity and penitence. Their life is spent in a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures, in the course of which they have not been interrupted by the slightest remorse. These excesses had led me to imagine that their perdition was inevitable; but you, father, inform me that these same excesses secure their salvation. Blessings on you, my good father, for this way of justifying people! Others prescribe painful austerities for healing the soul; but you show that souls which may be thought desperately distempered are in quite good health. What an excellent device for being happy both in this world and in the next! I had always supposed that the less a man thought of God, the more he sinned; but, from what I see now, if one could only succeed in bringing himself not to think upon God at all, everything would be pure with him in all time coming. Away with your half-and-half sinners, who retain some sneaking affection for virtue! They will be damned every one of them, these semi-sinners. But commend me to your arrant sinners—hardened, unalloyed, out-and-out, thorough-bred sinners. Hell is no place for them; they have cheated the devil, purely by virtue of their devotion to his service!”

The good father, who saw very well the connection between these consequences and his principle, dexterously evaded them; and maintaining his temper, either from good nature or policy, he merely replied: “To let you understand how we avoid these inconveniences, you must know that, while we affirm that these reprobates to whom you refer would be without sin if they had no thoughts of conversion and no desires to devote themselves to God, we maintain, that they all actually have such thoughts and desires, and that God never permitted a man to sin without giving him previously a view of the evil which he contemplated, and a desire, either to avoid the offence, or at all events to implore his aid to enable him to avoid it; and none but Jansenists will assert the contrary.”

“Strange! father,” returned I; “is this, then, the heresy of the Jansenists, to deny that every time a man commits a sin, he is troubled with a remorse of conscience, in spite of which, he ‘leaps the fence and transgresses,’ as Father Bauny has it? It is rather too good a joke to be made a heretic for that. I can easily believe that a man may be damned for not having good thoughts; but it never would have entered my head to imagine that any man could be subjected to that doom for not believing that all mankind must have good thoughts! But, father, I hold myself bound in conscience to disabuse you, and to inform you that there are thousands of people who have no such desires—who sin without regret—who sin with delight—who make a boast of sinning. And who ought to know better about these things than yourself? You cannot have failed to have confessed some of those to whom I allude; for it is among persons of high rank that they are most generally to be met with.[^[125]] But mark, father, the dangerous consequences of your maxim. Do you not perceive what effect it may have on those libertines who like nothing better than to find out matter of doubt in religion? What a handle do you give them, when you assure them, as an article of faith, that on every occasion when they commit a sin, they feel an inward presentiment of the evil, and a desire to avoid it? Is it not obvious that, feeling convinced by their own experience of the falsity of your doctrine on this point, which you say is a matter of faith, they will extend the inference drawn from this to all the other points? They will argue that, since you are not trust-worthy in one article, you are to be suspected in them all; and thus you shut them up to conclude, either that religion is false, or that you must know very little about it.”

Here my friend the Jansenist, following up my remarks, said to him: “You would do well, father, if you wish to preserve your doctrine, not to explain so precisely as you have done to us, what you mean by actual grace. For, how could you, without forfeiting all credit in the estimation of men, openly declare that nobody sins without having previously the knowledge of his weakness, and of a physician, or the desire of a cure, and of asking it of God? Will it be believed, on your word, that those who are immersed in avarice, impurity, blasphemy, duelling, revenge, robbery and sacrilege, have really a desire to embrace chastity, humility, and the other Christian virtues? Can it be conceived that those philosophers who boasted so loudly of the powers of nature, knew its infirmity and its physician? Will you maintain that those who held it as a settled maxim that ‘it is not God that bestows virtue, and that no one ever asked it from him,’ would think of asking it for themselves? Who can believe that the Epicureans, who denied a divine providence, ever felt any inclination to pray to God?—men who said that ‘it would be an insult to invoke the Deity in our necessities, as if he were capable of wasting a thought on beings like us?’ In a word, how can it be imagined that idolaters and Atheists, every time they are tempted to the commission of sin, in other words, infinitely often during their lives, have a desire to pray to the true God, of whom they are ignorant, that he would bestow on them virtues of which they have no conception?”

“Yes,” said the worthy monk, in a resolute tone, “we will affirm it: and sooner than allow that any one sins without having the consciousness that he is doing evil, and the desire of the opposite virtue, we will maintain that the whole world, reprobates and infidels included, have these inspirations and desires in every case of temptation. You cannot show me, from the Scripture at least, that this is not the truth.”

On this remark I struck in, by exclaiming: “What! father, must we have recourse to the Scripture to demonstrate a thing so clear as this? This is not a point of faith, nor even of reason. It is a matter of fact: we see it—we know it—we feel it.”

But the Jansenist, keeping the monk to his own terms, addressed him as follows: “If you are willing, father, to stand or fall by Scripture, I am ready to meet you there; only you must promise to yield to its authority; and since it is written that ‘God has not revealed his judgments to the Heathen, but left them to wander in their own ways,’ you must not say that God has enlightened those whom the Sacred Writings assure us ‘he has left in darkness and in the shadow of death.’ Is it not enough to show the erroneousness of your principle, to find that St. Paul calls himself ‘the chief of sinners,’ for a sin which he committed ‘ignorantly, and with zeal?’ Is it not enough to find, from the Gospel, that those who crucified Jesus Christ had need of the pardon which he asked for them, although they knew not the malice of their action, and would never have committed it, according to St. Paul, if they had known it? Is it not enough that Jesus Christ apprizes us that there will be persecutors of the Church, who, while making every effort to ruin her, will ‘think that they are doing God service;’ teaching us that this sin, which in the judgment of the apostle, is the greatest of all sins, may be committed by persons who, so far from knowing that they were sinning, would think that they sinned by not committing it? In fine, is it not enough that Jesus Christ himself has taught us that there are two kinds of sinners, the one of whom sin with ‘knowledge of their Master’s will,’ and the other without knowledge; and that both of them will be ‘chastised,’ although, indeed, in a different manner?”

Sorely pressed by so many testimonies from Scripture, to which he had appealed, the worthy monk began to give way; and, leaving the wicked to sin without inspiration, he said: “You will not deny that good men, at least, never sin unless God give them”——“You are flinching,” said I, interrupting him; “you are flinching now, my good father; you abandon the general principle, and finding that it will not hold good in regard to the wicked, you would compound the matter, by making it apply at least to the righteous. But in this point of view the application of it is, I conceive, so circumscribed, that it will hardly apply to anybody, and it is scarcely worth while to dispute the point.”

My friend, however, who was so ready on the whole question, that I am inclined to think he had studied it all that very morning, replied: “This, father, is the last entrenchment to which those of your party who are willing to reason at all are sure to retreat; but you are far from being safe even here. The example of the saints is not a whit more in your favor. Who doubts that they often fall into sins of surprise, without being conscious of them? Do we not learn from the saints themselves how often concupiscence lays hidden snares for them; and how generally it happens, as St. Augustine complains of himself in his Confessions, that, with all their discretion, they ‘give to pleasure what they mean only to give to necessity?’

“How usual is it to see the more zealous friends of truth betrayed by the heat of controversy into sallies of bitter passion for their personal interests, while their consciences, at the time, bear them no other testimony than that they are acting in this manner purely for the interests of truth, and they do not discover their mistake till long afterwards!

“What, again, shall we say of those who, as we learn from examples in ecclesiastical history, eagerly involve themselves in affairs which are really bad, because they believe them to be really good; and yet this does not hinder the fathers from condemning such persons as having sinned on these occasions?

“And were this not the case, how could the saints have their secret faults? How could it be true that God alone knows the magnitude and the number of our offences; that no one knows whether he is worthy of hatred or love; and that the best of saints, though unconscious of any culpability, ought always, as St. Paul says of himself, to remain in ‘fear and trembling?’[^[126]]

“You perceive, then, father, that this knowledge of the evil, and love of the opposite virtue, which you imagine to be essential to constitute sin, are equally disproved by the examples of the righteous and of the wicked. In the case of the wicked, their passion for vice sufficiently testifies that they have no desire for virtue; and in regard to the righteous, the love which they bear to virtue plainly shows that they are not always conscious of those sins which, as the Scripture teaches, they are daily committing.

“So true is it, indeed, that the righteous often sin through ignorance, that the greatest saints rarely sin otherwise. For how can it be supposed that souls so pure, who avoid with so much care and zeal the least things that can be displeasing to God as soon as they discover them, and who yet sin many times every day, could possibly have, every time before they fell into sin, ‘the knowledge of their infirmity on that occasion, and of their physician, and the desire of their souls’ health, and of praying to God for assistance,’ and that, in spite of these inspirations, these devoted souls ‘nevertheless transgress,’ and commit the sin?

“You must conclude then, father, that neither sinners nor yet saints have always that knowledge, or those desires and inspirations every time they offend; that is, to use your own terms, they have not always actual grace. Say no longer, with your modern authors, that it is impossible for those to sin who do not know righteousness; but rather join with St. Augustine and the ancient fathers in saying that it is impossible not to sin, when we do not know righteousness: Necesse est ut peccet, a quo ignoratur justitia.”

The good father, though thus driven from both of his positions, did not lose courage, but after ruminating a little, “Ha!” he exclaimed, “I shall settle you immediately.” And again taking up Father Bauny, he pointed to the same place he had before quoted, exclaiming: “Look now—see the ground on which he establishes his opinion! I was sure he would not be deficient in good proofs. Read what he quotes from Aristotle, and you will see that after so express an authority, you must either burn the books of this prince of philosophers or adopt our opinion. Hear, then, the principles which support Father Bauny: Aristotle states first, ‘that an action cannot be imputed as blameworthy, if it be involuntary.’”

“I grant that,” said my friend.

“This is the first time you have agreed together,” said I. “Take my advice, father, and proceed no further.”

“That would be doing nothing,” he replied; “we must know what are the conditions necessary to constitute an action voluntary.”

“I am much afraid,” returned I, “that you will get at loggerheads on that point.”

“No fear of that,” said he; “this is sure ground—Aristotle is on my side. Hear, now, what Father Bauny says: ‘In order that an action be voluntary, it must proceed from a man who perceives, knows, and comprehends what is good and what is evil in it. Voluntarium est—that is a voluntary action, as we commonly say with the philosopher’ (that is Aristotle, you know, said the monk, squeezing my hand;) ‘quod fit a principio cognoscente singula in quibus est actio—which is done by a person knowing the particulars of the action; so that when the will is led inconsiderately, and without mature reflection, to embrace or reject, to do or omit to do anything, before the understanding has been able to see whether it would be right or wrong, such an action is neither good nor evil; because previous to this mental inquisition, view, and reflection on the good or bad qualities of the matter in question, the act by which it is done is not voluntary.’ Are you satisfied now?” said the father.

“It appears,” returned I, “that Aristotle agrees with Father Bauny; but that does not prevent me from feeling surprised at this statement. What, sir! is it not enough to make an action voluntary that the man knows what he is doing, and does it just because he chooses to do it? Must we suppose, besides this, that he ‘perceives, knows, and comprehends what is good and evil in the action?’ Why, on this supposition there would be hardly such a thing in nature as voluntary actions, for nobody almost thinks about all this. How many oaths in gambling—how many excesses in debauchery—how many riotous extravagances in the carnival, must, on this principle, be excluded from the list of voluntary actions, and consequently neither good nor bad, because not accompanied by those ‘mental reflections on the good and evil qualities’ of the action? But is it possible, father, that Aristotle held such a sentiment? I have always understood that he was a sensible man.”

“I shall soon convince you of that,” said the Jansenist; and requesting a sight of Aristotle’s Ethics, he opened it at the beginning of the third book, from which Father Bauny had taken the passage quoted, and said to the monk: “I excuse you, my dear sir, for having believed, on the word of Father Bauny, that Aristotle held such a sentiment; but you would have changed your mind had you read him for yourself. It is true that he teaches, that ‘in order to make an action voluntary, we must know the particulars of that action’—singula in quibus est actio. But what else does he mean by that, than the particular circumstances of the action? The examples which he adduces clearly show this to be his meaning, for they are exclusively confined to cases in which the persons were ignorant of some of the circumstances; such as that of ‘a person who, wishing to exhibit a machine, discharges a dart which wounds a bystander; and that of Merope, who killed her own son instead of her enemy,’ and such like.

“Thus you see what is the kind of ignorance that renders actions involuntary; namely, that of the particular circumstances, which is termed by divines, as you must know, ignorance of the fact. But with respect to ignorance of the right—ignorance of the good or evil in an action—which is the only point in question, let us see if Aristotle agrees with Father Bauny. Here are the words of the philosopher: ‘All wicked men are ignorant of what they ought to do, and what they ought to avoid; and it is this very ignorance which makes them wicked and vicious. Accordingly, a man cannot be said to act involuntarily merely because he is ignorant of what it is proper for him to do in order to fulfil his duty. This ignorance in the choice of good and evil does not make the action involuntary; it only makes it vicious. The same thing may be affirmed of the man who is ignorant generally of the rules of his duty; such ignorance is worthy of blame, not of excuse. And consequently, the ignorance which renders actions involuntary and excusable is simply that which relates to the fact and its particular circumstances. In this case the person is excused and forgiven, being considered as having acted contrary to his inclination.’

“After this, father, will you maintain that Aristotle is of your opinion? And who can help being astonished to find that a Pagan philosopher had more enlightened views than your doctors, in a matter so deeply affecting morals, and the direction of conscience, too, as the knowledge of those conditions which render actions voluntary or involuntary, and which, accordingly, charge or discharge them as sinful? Look for no more support, then, father, from the prince of philosophers, and no longer oppose yourselves to the prince of theologians,[^[127]] who has thus decided the point in the first book of his Retractations, chapter XV.: ‘Those who sin through ignorance, though they sin without meaning to sin, commit the deed only because they will commit it. And, therefore, even this sin of ignorance cannot be committed except by the will of him who commits it, though by a will which incites him to the action merely, and not to the sin; and yet the action itself is nevertheless sinful, for it is enough to constitute it such that he has done what he was bound not to do.’”

The Jesuit seemed to be confounded more with the passage from Aristotle, I thought, than that from St. Augustine; but while he was thinking on what he could reply, a messenger came to inform him that Madame la Mareschale of ——, and Madame the Marchioness of ——, requested his attendance. So taking a hasty leave of us, he said: “I shall speak about it to our fathers. They will find an answer to it, I warrant you; we have got some long heads among us.”

We understood him perfectly well; and on our being left alone, I expressed to my friend my astonishment at the subversion which this doctrine threatened to the whole system of morals. To this he replied that he was quite astonished at my astonishment. “Are you not yet aware,” he said, “that they have gone to far greater excess in morals than in any other matter?” He gave me some strange illustrations of this, promising me more at some future time. The information which I may receive on this point, will, I hope, furnish the topic of my next communication.—I am, &c.

LETTER V.

DESIGN OF THE JESUITS IN ESTABLISHING A NEW SYSTEM OF MORALS—TWO SORTS OF CASUISTS AMONG THEM, A GREAT MANY LAX, AND SOME SEVERE ONES—REASON OF THIS DIFFERENCE—EXPLANATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF PROBABILITY—A MULTITUDE OF MODERN AND UNKNOWN AUTHORS SUBSTITUTED IN THE PLACE OF THE HOLY FATHERS.

Paris, March 20, 1656.

Sir,—According to my promise, I now send you the first outlines of the morals taught by those good fathers the Jesuits—“those men distinguished for learning and sagacity, who are all under the guidance of divine wisdom—a surer guide than all philosophy.” You imagine, perhaps, that I am in jest, but I am perfectly serious; or rather, they are so when they speak thus of themselves in their book entitled “The Image of the First Century.”[^[128]] I am only copying their own words, and may now give you the rest of the eulogy: “They are a society of men, or rather let us call them angels, predicted by Isaiah in these words, ‘Go, ye swift and ready angels.’”[^[129]] The prediction is as clear as day, is it not? “They have the spirit of eagles; they are a flock of phœnixes (a late author having demonstrated that there are a great many of these birds); they have changed the face of Christendom!” Of course, we must believe all this, since they have said it; and in one sense you will find the account amply verified by the sequel of this communication, in which I propose to treat of their maxims.

Determined to obtain the best possible information, I did not trust to the representations of our friend the Jansenist, but sought an interview with some of themselves. I found, however, that he told me nothing but the bare truth, and I am persuaded he is an honest man. Of this you may judge from the following account of these conferences.

In the conversation I had with the Jansenist, he told me so many strange things about these fathers, that I could with difficulty believe them, till he pointed them out to me in their writings; after which he left me nothing more to say in their defence, than that these might be the sentiments of some individuals only, which it was not fair to impute to the whole fraternity.[^[130]] And, indeed, I assured him that I knew some of them who were as severe as those whom he quoted to me were lax. This led him to explain to me the spirit of the Society, which is not known to every one; and you will perhaps have no objections to learn something about it.

“You imagine,” he began, “that it would tell considerably in their favor to show that some of their fathers are as friendly to Evangelical maxims as others are opposed to them; and you would conclude from that circumstance, that these loose opinions do not belong to the whole Society. That I grant you; for had such been the case, they would not have suffered persons among them holding sentiments so diametrically opposed to licentiousness. But as it is equally true that there are among them those who hold these licentious doctrines, you are bound also to conclude that the Spirit of the Society is not that of Christian severity; for had such been the case, they would not have suffered persons among them holding sentiments so diametrically opposed to that severity.”

“And what, then,” I asked, “can be the design of the whole as a body? Perhaps they have no fixed principle, and every one is left to speak out at random whatever he thinks.”

“That cannot be,” returned my friend; “such an immense body could not subsist in such a hap-hazard sort of way, or without a soul to govern and regulate its movements; besides, it is one of their express regulations, that none shall print a page without the approval of their superiors.”

“But,” said I, “how can these same superiors give their consent to maxims so contradictory?”

“That is what you have yet to learn,” he replied. “Know, then, that their object is not the corruption of manners—that is not their design. But as little is it their sole aim to reform them—that would be bad policy. Their idea is briefly this: They have such a good opinion of themselves as to believe that it is useful, and in some sort essentially necessary to the good of religion, that their influence should extend everywhere, and that they should govern all consciences. And the Evangelical or severe maxims being best fitted for managing some sorts of people, they avail themselves of these when they find them favorable to their purpose. But as these maxims do not suit the views of the great bulk of people, they wave them in the case of such persons, in order to keep on good terms with all the world. Accordingly, having to deal with persons of all classes and of all different nations, they find it necessary to have casuists cut out to match this diversity.

“On this principle, you will easily see that if they had none but the looser sort of casuists, they would defeat their main design, which is to embrace all; for those that are truly pious are fond of a stricter discipline. But as there are not many of that stamp, they do not require many severe directors to guide them. They have a few for the select few; while whole multitudes of lax casuists are provided for the multitudes that prefer laxity.[^[131]]

“It is in virtue of this ‘obliging and accommodating’ conduct, as Father Petau[^[132]] calls it, that they may be said to stretch out a helping hand to all mankind. Should any person present himself before them, for example, fully resolved to make restitution of some ill-gotten gains, do not suppose that they would dissuade him from it. By no means; on the contrary, they will applaud and confirm him in such a holy resolution. But suppose another should come who wishes to be absolved without restitution, and it will be a particularly hard case indeed, if they cannot furnish him with means of evading the duty, of one kind or another, the lawfulness of which they will be ready to guarantee.

“By this policy they keep all their friends, and defend themselves against all their foes; for, when charged with extreme laxity, they have nothing more to do than produce their austere directors, with some books which they have written on the severity of the Christian code of morals; and simple people, or those who never look below the surface of things, are quite satisfied with these proofs of the falsity of the accusation.

“Thus are they prepared for all sorts of persons, and so ready are they to suit the supply to the demand, that when they happen to be in any part of the world where the doctrine of a crucified God is accounted foolishness, they suppress the offence of the cross, and preach only a glorious and not a suffering Jesus Christ. This plan they followed in the Indies and in China, where they permitted Christians to practise idolatry itself, with the aid of the following ingenious contrivance:—they made their converts conceal under their clothes an image of Jesus Christ, to which they taught them to transfer mentally those adorations which they rendered ostensibly to the idol Cachinchoam and Keum-fucum. This charge is brought against them by Gravina, a Dominican, and is fully established by the Spanish memorial presented to Philip IV., king of Spain, by the Cordeliers of the Philippine Islands, quoted by Thomas Hurtado, in his ‘Martyrdom of the Faith,’ page 427. To such a length did this practice go, that the Congregation De Propaganda were obliged expressly to forbid the Jesuits, on pain of excommunication, to permit the worship of idols on any pretext whatever, or to conceal the mystery of the cross from their catechumens; strictly enjoining them to admit none to baptism who were not thus instructed, and ordering them to expose the image of the crucifix in their churches:—all which is amply detailed in the decree of that Congregation, dated the 9th of July, 1646, and signed by Cardinal Capponi.[^[133]]

“Such is the manner in which they have spread themselves over the whole earth, aided by the doctrine of probable opinions, which is at once the source and the basis of all this licentiousness. You must get some of themselves to explain this doctrine to you. They make no secret of it, any more than of what you have already learned; with this difference only, that they conceal their carnal and worldly policy under the garb of divine and Christian prudence; as if the faith, and tradition its ally, were not always one and the same at all times and in all places; as if it were the part of the rule to bend in conformity to the subject which it was meant to regulate; and as if souls, to be purified from their pollutions, had only to corrupt the law of the Lord, in place of ‘the law of the Lord, which is clean and pure, converting the soul which lieth in sin,’ and bringing it into conformity with its salutary lessons!

“Go and see some of these worthy fathers, I beseech you, and I am confident that you will soon discover, in the laxity of their moral system, the explanation of their doctrine about grace. You will then see the Christian virtues exhibited in such a strange aspect, so completely stripped of the charity which is the life and soul of them—you will see so many crimes palliated and irregularities tolerated, that you will no longer be surprised at their maintaining that ‘all men have always enough of grace’ to lead a pious life, in the sense in which they understand piety. Their morality being entirely Pagan, nature is quite competent to its observance. When we maintain the necessity of efficacious grace, we assign it another sort of virtue for its object. Its office is not to cure one vice by means of another; it is not merely to induce men to practise the external duties of religion: it aims at a virtue higher than that propounded by Pharisees, or the greatest sages of Heathenism. The law and reason are ‘sufficient graces’ for these purposes. But to disenthral the soul from the love of the world—to tear it from what it holds most dear—to make it die to itself—to lift it up and bind it wholly, only, and forever, to God—can be the work of none but an all-powerful hand. And it would be as absurd to affirm that we have the full power of achieving such objects, as it would be to allege that those virtues, devoid of the love of God, which these fathers confound with the virtues of Christianity, are beyond our power.”

Such was the strain of my friend’s discourse, which was delivered with much feeling; for he takes these sad disorders very much to heart. For my own part, I began to entertain a high admiration of these fathers, simply on account of the ingenuity of their policy; and following his advice, I waited on a good casuist of the Society, one of my old acquaintances, with whom I now resolved purposely to renew my former intimacy. Having my instructions how to manage them, I had no great difficulty in getting him afloat. Retaining his old attachment, he received me immediately with a profusion of kindness; and after talking over some indifferent matters, I took occasion from the present season,[^[134]] to learn something from him about fasting, and thus slip insensibly into the main subject. I told him, therefore, that I had difficulty in supporting the fast. He exhorted me to do violence to my inclinations; but as I continued to murmur, he took pity on me, and began to search out some ground for a dispensation. In fact he suggested a number of excuses for me, none of which happened to suit my case, till at length he bethought himself of asking me, whether I did not find it difficult to sleep without taking supper? “Yes, my good father,” said I; “and for that reason I am obliged often to take a refreshment at mid-day, and supper at night.”[^[135]]

“I am extremely happy,” he replied, “to have found out a way of relieving you without sin: go in peace—you are under no obligation to fast. However, I would not have you depend on my word: step this way to the library.”

On going thither with him he took up a book, exclaiming, with great rapture, “Here is the authority for you: and, by my conscience, such an authority! It is Escobar!”[^[136]]

“Who is Escobar?” I inquired.

“What! not know Escobar?” cried the monk; “the member of our Society who compiled this Moral Theology from twenty-four of our fathers, and on this founds an analogy, in his preface, between his book and ‘that in the Apocalypse which was sealed with seven seals,’ and states that ‘Jesus presents it thus sealed to the four living creatures, Suarez, Vasquez, Molina, and Valencia,[^[137]] in presence of the four-and-twenty Jesuits who represent the four-and-twenty elders?’”

He read me, in fact, the whole of that allegory, which he pronounced to be admirably appropriate, and which conveyed to my mind a sublime idea of the excellence of the work. At length, having sought out the passage on fasting, “O here it is!” he said; “treatise 1, example 13, no. 67: ‘If a man cannot sleep without taking supper, is he bound to fast? Answer: By no means!’ Will that not satisfy you?”

“Not exactly,” replied I; “for I might sustain the fast by taking my refreshment in the morning, and supping at night.”

“Listen, then, to what follows; they have provided for all that: ‘And what is to be said, if the person might make a shift with a refreshment in the morning and supping at night?’”

“That’s my case exactly.”

“‘Answer: Still he is not obliged to fast; because no person is obliged to change the order of his meals.’”

“A most excellent reason!” I exclaimed.

“But tell me, pray,” continued the monk, “do you take much wine?”

“No, my dear father,” I answered; “I cannot endure it.”