Antoine Arnauld was the last of the twenty children born to the great parliamentary orator and Catherine Marion his wife, of whom we have already spoken. His nephews, Le Maitre and De Saci, were so near his own age, that they were accustomed to call him familiarly le petit oncle. Early consecrated to theological studies by the influence of St Cyran and his mother, he espoused zealously the Augustinian doctrines. A splendid prospect seemed opening before him, had he chosen to enter the Church and pursue an ecclesiastical career in the ordinary manner. But while thirsting for theological distinction, he had scruples about his vocation to the holy office. He overcame his scruples so far as to become a priest; but not only would he not accept the benefices placed within his reach by powerful friendshe insisted on resigning such as he held. He even disposed of his patrimony for the benefit of Port Royal, preserving only as much as would provide him with the bare necessaries of life. He became a doctor in 1641, and already, in 1643, the interest of the whole theological world was aroused by his treatise, Of Frequent Communion.

The aim of this treatise, as of all Arnaulds writings, was anti-Jesuitical. He set forth, backed by the authority of Fathers, Popes, and Councils, the necessity of spiritual preparation for the Holy Communion, in opposition to the formula which had been boldly advanced by more than one Jesuit teacher, that the more we are devoid of divine grace, the more ought we to seek Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. The commotion made by the publication shows how grave was the need for it. On the one hand it was warmly welcomed, many pious bishops and doctors testifying approbation of its contents; on the other hand it was violently assailed. The Jesuit pulpits resounded with abuse of it and of its author. All Paris was disturbed by the noise which it made. There must be a snake in the grass somewhere, it was wittily remarked, for the Jesuits were never so excited when only the glory of God was at stake. The learned Petavius, and even the Prince de Condé, did not disdain to mingle in the combat. For a time Arnauld seemed to triumph, but finally the influence of Rome was brought against him, and he was glad to take refuge in concealmentthe first of the many concealments into which his incessant polemical activity drove him in the course of his long life. He never abated his opposition. He had no sooner retired from one controversy, than he reappeared in some other. His energy knew no bounds, his love of fighting no pause. When in his old age his friend and fellow-student Nicole advised him to rest. Rest! he said; have I not all eternity to rest in?

It was a matter of course that when the great Jansenist controversy began, Arnauld should be found in the van of it. An Apology for Jansen appeared from his pen in 1644, and a second Apology in the following year. It seemed for a time as if the Jesuits would be foiled in their efforts to secure the effectual condemnation of the book. But at length one of their number, Nicolas Cornet, Syndic of the Faculty of Theology at Paris, collected its essential heresy in the shape of seven propositions. These propositions were afterwards reduced to five; and at length, on the 31st of May 1653, a formal condemnation of them was obtained from the Court of Rome. There was no longer any doubt as to the attitude of the Holy See. All the propositions were declared to be distinctly heretical, and the first and the fifth, moreover, to be blasphemous and impious. This result was not reached without much debate and delay. No sooner had Cornets propositions appeared than Arnauld assailed them and all who supported them. A congregation of four cardinals and eleven theological assessors had been appointed to examine them in the end of the year 1651. They had taken, therefore, a year and a half to their work, and the sentence at length issued was intended to bring the long warfare to a close. In point of fact it kindled a fresh fire, and opened, if not a larger, yet a more vital controversy. Arnauld retired willingly before a new writer summoned by himself into the field, and girded with his blessing as he went forth to the encounter.

The five propositions, which were professed to be extracted from Jansens book, and as such were condemned by the Papal Bull of 31st May 1653, are so intimately connected with the Provincial Letters as to claim a place in our pages. They are as follows:

I. There are divine commandments which good men, although willing, are unable to obey; and the grace by which these commandments are possible is also wanting in them.

II. No person, in the state of fallen nature, is able to resist internal grace.

III. In order to render human actions meritorious or otherwise, liberty from necessity is not required, but only liberty from constraint.

IV. The semi-Pelagians, while admitting the necessity of prevenient graceor grace preceding all actionswere heretics, inasmuch as they said that this grace was such as man could, according to his will, either resist or obey.

V. The semi-Pelagians also erred in saying that Christ died or shed His blood for all men universally.

It would be needless for us to touch these propositions, even by way of explanation. We have endeavoured to state them from the original Latin as clearly as we can, so that they may bear some definite meaning even to the non-theological reader. But their very statement bristles with controversy, and the half-extinct meanings of old questions that go to the root of Christian thought lie hid in their language. All the propositions were condemned without reserve, but two points were left unsettled. It was not asserted that the propositions were to be found in the Augustinus, and that they were condemned in the sense in which Jansen held them, and in no other. The course of the controversy and the fate of Port Royal in the end mainly turned upon these points.

The Papal Bull condemning the five propositions was speedily published in France, and the triumph of the Jesuits was undisguised. A great blow had been struck, and for a time all seemed inclined to bow before it. Political reasons combined with others to give effect to the Papal verdict. Cardinal Mazarin, in possession of the favour of the Queen-mother, had imprisoned his enemy, Cardinal de Retz, who had so long waged in the intrigues and wars of the Fronde a restless conflict with them; and as the latter in his prosperity had shown a certain favour for Port Royal, this was enough to stimulate, on the part of Mazarin, an interest on behalf of the Jesuits. Yet he was reluctant to move actively against the Jansenists. M. dAndilly still had his ear in matters of State, and by his intervention and that of others the project of an armistice was for a time entertained. Port Royal was to keep silence, if its enemies did not push their triumph to an extremity. Even the indefatigable Arnauld seems to have promised to be quiet. But the Jesuits were too conscious of their power, and too relentless in their hostility, to pause in their determination to crush their opponents. They had recourse both to gibes and to active persecution. They printed an almanac with the figure of Jansen as frontispiece, flying in the guise of a winged devil before the Pope and the king into the arms of the Huguenots. They assailed the Duc de Liancourt, and refused him absolution in his own parish church, for no other reason but that he was on friendly relations with Port Royal, and would not withdraw, at their demand, his granddaughter from its protection. This affair, which appears to have been deliberately planned, caused a great sensation, and became, strangely, the indirect occasion of the Provincial Letters.

Indignant at such an outrage, Arnauld was no longer to be restrained. He rushed before the public with a pamphlet under the title, Letter of a Doctor of the Sorbonne to a Person of Condition, concerning an event which has recently happened in a parish of Paris to a Nobleman of the Court, February 24, 1655. The Letter opened with an expression of his wish to dispute no more; but as Sainte-Beuve hints, the avowed desire of peace plunged him all the more into war. His letter called forth numerous replies. He responded by a Second Letter, in the shape of a volume. In this letter his enemies seemed to see his fate written. They extracted from it two propositions which in their view clearly contravened the Papal verdictnamely, 1st, that he had expressed doubts whether the five propositions condemned as heretical were in Jansens book at all; and 2d, that he had really reproduced the first of the five condemned propositions in one of his own statements, that according to both the Gospel and the Fathers, St Peter, a just man, was wanting in grace when he fell. This was nothing but undisguised Jansenism, and his accusers in the Sorbonne rallied for his overthrow. A meeting was summoned to consider the letter, and to judge it and the author.

The details of the proceedings would weary the reader. It is sufficient to say that, notwithstanding the concessions wrung from Arnauld, some of which were humiliating enough, he was condemned on the first point (Jan. 1656)the great question of fait, in contrast to the question of droit, involved in the second statement as to grace being wanting to St Peter in his fall. His condemnation, however, was mainly secured by the introduction of a number of monks who swelled the majority against him, and the legality of whose vote was challenged by many members. But, as Pascal afterwards said, it was easier to find monks than arguments. The second and doctrinal point received professedly more deliberate discussion. The sittings regarding it were protracted till the close of the month, the 29th of January. But the result was really forestalled. The restriction laid on free debate was such as to lead no fewer than sixty doctors to withdraw, protesting to Parliament against the interference with their rights. Their protest, however, came to nothing. Sentence was finally passed, against not only Arnauld, but all who adhered to him or espoused his opinions. The victim, with his usual adroitness, escaped his pursuers, and went once more into a concealment which all their vigilance could not penetrate. Two days after the censure he wrote to one of his nieces, I am in very close hiding, and by Gods grace without trouble or disquiet. Would you like me to tell you where M. Arnauld is hidden? inquired a lady of the gendarmes who were searching her house for traces of him. He is safely hidden here, pointing to her heart; arrest him if you can.

It was in the interval betwixt the first and second judgment of the Sorbonne that the first of the Provincial Letters appeared. The story is, {116a} that during the course of the process Arnauld, Nicole, and Pascal, along with M. Vitart, the steward of the Duc de Luynes (to whom Arnaulds second Letter had been addressed), and other friends, were met in secrecy at Port Royal des Champs. Their conversation turned to the pending case, and the misapprehensions and prejudices which prevailed in the public mind regarding it. It was felt that some effort should be made to clear away these prejudices, and to diffuse right information in a popular form. Arnauld, ever ready with his pen, was prepared himself to undertake this task; and in a few days afterwards he read to his friends a long and serious paper in vindication of his position. But his friends were not moved as he expected. His pen, powerful in its own sphere, was not fitted to tell upon the popular mind; and his audience were too honest to conceal their disappointment. Arnauld, in his turn, frankly acknowledged the truth forced upon him. I see you do not find my paper what you wished, and I believe you are right, he said; and then, turning all at once to Pascal, he said, But you, who are young, who are clever, {116b} you ought to do something. The effect was not lost upon Pascal. He divined with his genuine literary instinct exactly what was required in the circumstances, although distrusting his power to produce it. He promised, however, to make an attempt, which his friends might polish and put in shape as they thought fit. Next day he produced A Letter written to a Provincial by one of his friends. The Letter was unanimously pronounced exactly what was required, and ordered to be printed. It appeared on the 23d January 1656; and a second followed six days later.

Nothing could have been happier or more admirably suited for their purpose than those Letters. They took up the subject for the first time in a light intelligible to all. They brought to play upon it not only a penetrating and rapid intelligence, but a brightness of wit, and a dramatic creativeness, which made the Sorbonne and its parties, the Jansenists and their friends, alive before the reader. Never was the triumph of genius over mere learned labour more complete. Arnauld, as he listened to them, must have felt his own thoughts spring up before him into a living shape, hardly less startling to himself than to his opponents.

Addressing his friend in the country, the author expresses his surprise at what he has come to learn of the character of the disputes dividing the Sorbonne:

We have been imposed upon, he says. It was only yesterday that I was undeceived. Until then I had thought that the disputes of the Sorbonne were really important, and deeply affected the interests of religion. The frequent convocation of an assembly so illustrious as that of the Theological Faculty of Paris, attended by so many extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances, induced such high expectations that one could not help believing the business to be of extraordinary importance. You will be much surprised, however, when you learn from this letter the upshot of the grand demonstration. I can explain the matter in a few words, having made myself perfectly master of it.

Two questions, he says, were under examinationthe one a question of fact, the other a question of right.

He explains the question of fact as consisting in the point whether M. Arnauld was guilty of temerity in expressing his doubts as to the propositions being in Jansens book after the bishops had declared that they were. No fewer than seventy-one doctors undertook his defence, maintaining that all that could reasonably be asked of him was to say that he had not been able to find them, but that if they were in the book, he condemned them there.

Some, he continues, even went a step farther, and protested that, after all the search they had made in 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 be reasonably refused, as that would be the surest way to silence all objectors, M. Arnauld included. But this they have always refused to do. So much for the one side.

On the other side are eighty secular doctors, and some forty mendicant friars, who have condemned M. Arnaulds proposition, without choosing to examine whether he has spoken truly or falselywho, in fact, have declared that they have nothing to do with the veracity of his proposition, but simply with its temerity. Besides these were fifteen who were not in favour of the censure, and who are called Neutrals.

Having thus stated the question of fact, and the balance of parties regarding it, Pascal dismisses it at once, important as it proved in the after-history of Port Royal.

As to the issue of the question of fact, I own 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 Jansen, his book is neither so very scarce nor so very large but that I can read it all through for my own enlightenment without consulting the Sorbonne at all.

Only, while himself hitherto inclined to believe with common report that the propositions were in Jansen, he was now almost led to doubt that they were so from the absurd refusal to point them out. In this respect he fears the censure will do more harm than good. For, in truth, people have become sceptical of late, and will not believe things till they see them.

But the point being in itself so frivolous, he hastens to take up the question of right, as touching the faith. And here the play of the dialogue begins:

You and I supposed that the question here was one involving the deepest principles of grace, as to whether it is given to all men, or whether it is efficacious of itself. But truly we were deceived. You must know I have become a great theologian in a short time, and you will see the proofs of it.

He describes, then, how he had made a visit to a doctor of the Sorbonne, who was his neighbour, and one of the most zealous opponents of the Jansenists, to inquire into the controversy. He asked him why the question as to grace should not be set at rest by a formal decision that grace is really given to all? But he received a rude rebuff, and was told that this was not the point. There were those on his side who held that grace is not given to all, and even the examiners themselves had declared, in a full meeting of the Sorbonne, that this opinion was problematical. This was, in fact, his own view; and he confirmed it by what he said was a celebrated passage of St Augustine, We know that grace is not given to all men. He was equally unfortunate in his second inquiry. His neighbour, opposed as he was to Jansenism, would not condemn the doctrine of efficacious grace. The doctrine, on the contrary, was quite orthodox, was held by the Jesuits, and had even been defended by himself in his thesis at the Sorbonne. The inquirer is confounded, and ventures to ask then in what M. Arnaulds heresy consisted? In this, replies his friend, that he does not acknowledge that the just have the power of obeying the commandments of God in the way in which we understand it. Having got to what he supposes the heart of the affair, he posts off to a Jansenist acquaintance, a very decent man notwithstanding. But if he was puzzled before, he is still more puzzled when he hears the worthy Jansenist declare that it is no heresy to hold that all the just have always the power of obeying the Divine commandments. Confounded by such a reply, he felt that he had been too plain-spoken with both Jansenist and Molinist. {120} There must be something more in this dispute than he understood; and if not, there was no reason why there should not now be peace in the Church and the Sorbonne. He returned to the Molinist, whom he had first visited, with this assurance. The Jansenists, he said, were quite at one with the Jesuits as to the power of the righteous always to obey the commandments of God.

All very well, said he, but you must be a theologian to see the gist of the matter. The difference between us is so subtle that we can hardly make it out ourselves. It is quite beyond your understanding. Suffice it for you to know that the Jansenists will indeed say that the just have always the power of obeying the commandmentsthis is not the point in dispute; but they will not say that this power is proximate. That is the point.

Mystified more than ever by this new and unknown expression, of which he could get no explanation, the inquirer now returned to his Jansenist friend to demand of him if he admitted it. Do you admit the proximate power? was all that he could say to him. He had charged his memory carefully with the expression, all the more that he did not understand it. The Jansenist smiled, and said coldly, Tell me in what sense you use the expression, and I will tell you what I believe about it. But this was just what he could not do. So he gave the haphazard answer, that he used it in the sense of the Molinists. Which of the Molinists? was the rejoinder. All of them together, as being one body, and having one and the same mind, was the second answer at random: upon which he is assured he is very ill informed; that the Molinists, instead of being at one, are hopelessly divided, but that being united in the design to ruin M. Arnauld, they have all agreed to use this term, understanding it in different senses, and so by an apparent agreement to form a compact body in order to crush him more confidently.

The ingenuous inquirer hesitates to believe in such wickedness. He professes himself to be animated by a pure desire of understanding the subject, and asks still that the mysterious word proximate may be explained to him. His Jansenist friend professes a willingness to enlighten him, but says that his explanation would be liable to suspicion. He must have recourse to those who invented the expression, and is referred to a M. le Moine, on the one hand, as representing the Molinists or Jesuits; and a Father Nicolai as representing the Dominicans or New Thomists. Both of these were real characters: the former a doctor of the Sorbonne, and a violent anti-Jansenist, who had written on the subject of grace; the latter a Dominican, who is said, however, by Nicole to have abandoned the principles of his order and embraced Pelagianism. The bewildered seeker after theological knowledge resorts, not to these worthies themselves, with whom he professes to have no acquaintance, but to certain disciples of theirs. In this manner he gets a definition of proximate power, from which it is apparent that, while the Jesuits and Dominicans are only agreed in using the same expressionthe meanings they put into it being entirely differentthe Jansenists and Dominicans agree in substance, while only differing in the use of words. The passage in which the result of his successive interviews is described is one of the happiest in the letter. On receiving from the Dominicans, whom he terms Jacobins, from their association with the Rue de St Jacques, where the first Dominican convent in Paris was erected, an explanation of the doctrine of grace, he exclaims:

Capital! So, according to you, the Jansenists are Catholics, and M. le Moine a heretic; for the Jansenists say that the just have the power of praying, but that further efficacious grace is necessaryand this is what you also approve. M. le Moine, however, says that the just may pray without efficacious graceand this you condemn. Ay, they replied, but M. le Moine calls this power proximate power. But what is this, my father, I exclaimed in turn, but to play with wordsto say that you agree as to the common terms you employ, while your sense is quite different? To this they made no reply; and at this very point the disciple of M. le Moine, with whom I had consulted, arrived by what seemed to me a lucky and extraordinary conjuncture. But I afterwards found that these meetings were not uncommon; that, in fact, they were continually mixing the one with the other. I addressed myself immediately to M. le Moines disciple: I know one, said I, who maintains that the just have always the power of praying to God, but that nevertheless they never pray without an efficacious grace which determines them, and which is not always given by God to all the just. Is such a one a heretic? Wait, said my doctor; you take me by surprise. Come, gently. Distinguo. If he calls this power proximate power, he is a Thomist, and yet a Catholic; if not, he is a Jansenist, and therefore a heretic. He calls it, said I, neither the one nor the other. He is a heretic then, said he; ask these good fathers. It was unnecessary to appeal to them, for already they had assented by a nod of their heads. But I insisted. He refuses to use the word proximate, because no one can explain it to him. Whereupon one of the fathers was about to give his definition of the term, when he was interrupted by M. le Moines disciple. What! said he; do you wish to recommence our quarrels? Have we not agreed never to attempt an explanation of this word proximate, but to use it on both sides without saying what it means? And to this the Jacobin assented. I saw at once into their plot, and rising to quit them, I said, Of a truth, my fathers, this is nothing, I fear, but a quibble; and whatever may come of your meetings, I venture to predict that when the censure is passed, peace will not be restored. . . Surely it is unworthy, both of the Sorbonne and of theology, to make use of equivocal and captious terms without giving any explanation of them. Tell me, I entreat you, for the last time, fathers, what I must believe in order to be a Catholic? You must say, they all cried at once, that all the just have the proximate power. . . . What necessity can there be, I argued, for using a word which has neither authority nor definite meaning? You are an opinionative fellow, they replied. You shall use the word, or you are a heretic, and M. Arnauld also; for we are the majority, and if necessary we can bring the Cordeliers into the field and carry the day.

The second Letter, entitled Of Sufficient Grace, is exactly in the same vein:

Just as I had sealed my last letter, the writer opens, I received a visit from our old friend, M. N—-, a most fortunate circumstance for the gratification of my curiosity. For he is thoroughly informed in the questions of the day, and up to all the secrets of the Jesuits, at whose houses, including those of the leading men, he is a constant visitor.

Using his friend conveniently as an informant, Pascal proceeds to explain to the Provincial the question of sufficient grace as betwixt the Jesuits, Jansenists, and Dominicans. The amusement of the Letter consists in the manner in which he brings out, as before, the substantial identity in opinion of the Dominicans and Jansenists, notwithstanding the junction of the former with the Jesuits to oppress the latter. The Jesuits hold the old Pelagian doctrine that grace is given to all, dependent for its efficacy upon the free will of the recipient. This is with them sufficient grace. The Jansenists follow St Augustine, and will not allow any grace to be sufficient which is not also efficacious. What is the view of the Dominican?

It is rather an odd one, he says; for while they agree with the Jesuits in allowing a sufficient grace given to all men, they nevertheless hold that with this grace alone men cannot act, but require further from God an efficacious grace which determines their will to action, and which is not given to all.

In short, this grace is sufficient without being so. It bears the same name as the grace of the Jesuits, but in reality the Dominican doctrine is that of the Jansenists, that men require efficacious grace in order to pious action. What is the meaning of all this jumble of opinion? Simply, that the Dominicans are too powerful to be quarrelled with. The Jesuits are content that they should so far use the same language with them.

They do not insist upon their denying the necessity of efficacious grace. This would be to press them too far. People should not tyrannise over their friends; and the Jesuits have really gained enough. But the world is content with words; and so the name of sufficient grace being received on all sides, though in different senses, none except the most subtle theologians can dream that the expression does not signify the same to the Jacobins and the Jesuits; and the result will show that the latter are not the greatest dupes.

This conclusion becomes the subject of conversational by-play, similar to that of the first Letter:

I went straight, adds the writer, to the Jacobins, at whose door I found a good friend of mine, a great Jansenistfor you must know I have friends amongst all partieswho was inquiring for another father, different from the one I wanted. But I persuaded him to accompany me, and asked for one of my New Thomist friends. He was delighted to see me again. Ah, well, I said to him, it seems it is not enough that all men have a proximate power by which they can never act with effect; they must also have a sufficient grace, with which they can act just as little. Is not this the opinion of your school? Yes, said the good father, and I have this very morning been maintaining this in the Sorbonne. I spoke my full half-hour; and had it not been for the sand-glass, I bade fair to reverse the unlucky proverb which circulates in ParisHe votes with his cap [merely by nodding his assent, without speaking] like a monk of the Sorbonne. And what about your half-hour and your sand-glass? said I. Do they shape your discourses by a certain measure? Yes, said he, for some days past. And do they oblige you to speak half an hour? No, we may speak as shortly as we like. But not, I said, as much as you like. What a capital rule for the ignorantwhat an excellent excuse for those who have nothing worth saying! But to come to the point, my fatherthis grace which is given to all, is it sufficient? Yes, said he. And yet it has no effect without efficacious grace? Quite true, said he. And all men have the sufficient, but not all the efficacious? Exactly so. That is to say, I urged, that all have enough grace, and yet not enoughthat there is a grace which is sufficient, and yet does not suffice. In good sooth, my father, that is subtle doctrine. Have you forgotten, in quitting the world, what the word sufficient means? Do you not remember that it includes everything necessary for acting? . . . How, then, do you leave it to be said, that all men have sufficient grace for acting, while you confess that another grace is absolutely necessary for acting, and that all have not this? . . . Is it a matter of indifference to say that with sufficient grace we can really act? Indifference! said he; why, it is heresyformal heresy. The necessity of efficacious grace for effective action is a point of faith. It is heresy to deny this. Where, then, are we now? and what side must I take? If I deny sufficient grace, I am a Jansenist. If I admit it, like the Jesuits, so that efficacious grace is no longer necessary, I shall be a heretic, you say. And if I admit it, as you do, so that efficacious grace is still necessary, why I sin against common-sense, I am a blockhead, say the Jesuits. What can I do in this dilemma, of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist? To what a strait are we come, if it is only Jansenists, after all, who are at variance with neither faith nor reason, and who preserve themselves both from folly and error?

The Dominican, in short, is made to appear very ridiculous in his union with the Jesuits. Clearly he fights on their side against the Jansenists at the expense of his honesty and consistency. He is confounded by a parable representing the absurdity of his position.

It is all very easy to talk, was all he could say in reply. You are an independent and private person; I am a monk, and in a community. Do you not understand the difference? We depend upon superiors; they depend upon others. They have promised our votes, and what would you have me to do? We understood his allusion, and remembered how a brother monk had been banished to Abbeville for a similar cause.

The writer is disposed to pity the monk as he relates with a melancholy tone how the Dominicans, who had from the time of St Thomas been such ardent defenders of the doctrine of grace, had been entrapped into making common cause with the Jesuits. The latter, availing themselves of the confusion and ignorance introduced by the Reformation, had disseminated their principles with great rapidity, and become masters of the popular belief; while the poor Dominicans found themselves in the predicament of either being denounced as Calvinists, and treated as the Jansenists then were, or of falling into the use of a common language with the Jesuits. What other course was open to them in such a case than that of saving the truth at the expense of their own credit! and while admitting the name of sufficient grace, denying, after all, that it was sufficient! That was the real history of the business.

This pitiful story of the New Thomist awakens a respondent pity in the writer. But his Jansenist companion is roused to indignant remonstrance:

Do not flatter yourselves, he exclaims, that you have saved the truth. If it had no other protector than you, it would have perished in such feeble hands. You have received into the Church the name of its enemy, and this is to receive the enemy itself. Names are inseparable from things. If the term sufficient grace be once admitted, you may talk finely about only understanding thereby a grace insufficient; but this will be of no avail. Your explanation will be held as odious in the world, where men speak far more sincerely of less important things. The Jesuits will triumph. It will be their sufficient grace, and not yourswhich is only a namewhich will be accepted. It will be theirs, which is the reverse of yours, that will become an article of faith.

In vain the New Thomist proclaims his readiness to suffer martyrdom rather than allow this, and to maintain the great doctrine of St Thomas to the death. His allusion to the importance of the doctrine only calls forth more severely the indignant eloquence of the Jansenist, and he brings the Letter to a close in a passage which forestalls the graver and loftier tone of the later Letters.

Confess, my father, that your order has received an honour which it ill discharges. It abandons that grace which has been intrusted to it, and which has never been abandoned since the creation of the world. That victorious grace which was expected by patriarchs, predicted by 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, sustained by St Thomas, the Angel of the Schools, transmitted by him to your order, maintained by so many of your fathers, and so gloriously defended by your monks under Popes Clement and Paulthat efficacious grace which was left in your hands as a sacred deposit, that it might always, in a sacred and enduring order, find preachers to proclaim it to the world till the end of timefinds itself deserted for interests utterly unworthy. It is time that other hands should arm themselves in its quarrel. It is time that God should raise up intrepid disciples to the Doctor of Grace, who, strangers to the entanglements of the world, should serve God for the sake of God. Grace may no longer count the Dominicans among her defenders; but she will never want defenders, for she creates them for herself by her own almighty strength. She demands pure and disengaged hearts, nay, she herself purifies and delivers them from worldly interests inconsistent with the truths of the Gospel. Consider well, my father, and take heed lest God remove the candle-stick from its place, and leave you in darkness and dishonour to punish the coldness which you have shown in a cause so important to His Church.

The first two Letters are closely connected. They deal with the special question between Arnauld and the Sorbonne. A short Reply from the Provincial is interposed between the second and third. This reply may be supposed to be a part of the device employed by Pascal to arouse public attention and circulate the Letters. The friend in the country tells how they have excited universal interest. Everybody has seen them, heard them, and believed them. They are valued not merely by theologians, but men of the world, and ladies, have found them intelligible and delightful reading. This is no exaggerated picture of the sensation which they produced. Their success was prodigious, and increased with every successive Letter. In an atmosphere charged with the theological spirit, yet wearied with the dulness of theological controversy, Pascals mode of treating the subject came as a breath of new life. Here was one who was evidently no mere theologianwho knew human nature as well as Divine truth. His clear and penetrating intellect saw at once the many aspects of the dispute lying deep in the human interests and passions engaged; and as he touched these one by one, and by subtle and vivid strokes brought them to the frontas Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist appeared upon the scene, and showed in their natural characters what play of dramatic life was moving under all the dulness of the debate at the Sorbonnethere was a universal outcry of welcome. The Letters passed from hand to hand. The post-office reaped a harvest of profit; copies went through the whole kingdom.

You can have no idea how much I am obliged to you for the Letter you sent me, writes a friend to a lady; it is so very ingenious, and so nicely written. It narrates without narrating. It clears up the most intricate matters possible; its raillery is exquisite; it enlightens those who know little of the subject, and imparts double delight to those who understand it. It is an admirable apology; and if they would take it, a delicate and innocent censure. In short, the Letter displays so much art, so much spirit, and so much judgment, that I burn with curiosity to know who wrote it.

This is the report of the Provincial; and if it is Pascal himself who speaks, he had little idea that his own badinage would be echoed by grave critics, in after-years, as not in excess of the actual merit of his productions. The best comedies of Molière, says Voltaire, have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters. It must be admitted that the brightness of the wit is somewhat dimmed after the lapse of two centuries. Even the genius of Pascal fails to lighten all the tortuous absurdities of controversies so purely verbal, and there is an occasional baldness in the clever device of pitting Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist against one another. The professed artlessness of the speeches is at times too apparent. But nothing, upon the whole, can be finer than the address with which this is done; the changes of scene and the turns of the dialogue are managed with admirable felicity; there is an exquisite fitness and Socratic point in all the evolutions of the argument, which we feel even now when we see so clearly behind the scenes, and know that Molinist and New Thomist must have had a good deal more to say for themselves. We have only to imagine the atmosphere of the Sorbonne, or the wider social atmosphere throughout France in the seventeenth century, impregnated to its core by a subtle controversial ecclesiasticism, to realise the impression made by the Small Letters. The question everywhere was, Who could have written them? There seems at first to have been no suspicion of Pascal. He had previously only been known as a scientific writer; and the secret was, of course, jealously guarded. Although planned at Port Royal des Champs, he did not remain there while engaged in their composition. He repaired, as we have already said, to Paris, and after a while took up his abode at a little inn opposite to the Jesuit College of Clermont, just behind the Sorbonne. Here he lodged with his brother-in-law, M. Périer, who had lately come to Paris; and here, too, the latter was visited by Père Defrétat, a Jesuit and distant relative, who came to tell him that the suspicions of the Society were beginning to point to Pascal. All the while Pascal was busy in the room below; and, behind the closed curtains of the bed by the side of which they were talking, a score of fresh impressions of the seventh Letter were laid out to dry. {132}

Pascal rejoiced in his incognito. It was not till the controversy had somewhat advanced that he assumed the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. The third Letter he closed mysteriously with the letters E. A. A. B. P. A. F. D. E. P., which have been interpreted to mean Et ancien ami Blaise Pascal, Auvergnat, fils de Étienne Pascal. There can be no doubt that he took a distinct pleasure in the anonymous wounds which he inflicted. He had a certain love of controversy from the beginning, a feeling of self-assertion when he took up a cause, and a personal ambition to triumph in it, which carried him forward, and which come out with almost painful vividness in the closing letters.

The rage of the Jesuits may be imagined. At first they hardly knew whether to laugh with the world or to be indignant. The first Letter was read in the dining-hall of the Sorbonne itself. Some were amused, others greatly provoked. But, as the Letters proceeded, there was no room for any feeling but indignation. It was so difficult to set forth any direct reply to productions mingling such a subtle irony with grave attack. They could only say of them, as they afterwards more formally didLes menteurs immortelles. Of the first Letters it is said that 6000 copies were printed; but, as they were easily passed from hand to hand, this gives no idea of the numbers who actually read them. Their fame grew with each successive issue. More than 10,000 copies were printed of the seventeenth Letter; and editions of the earlier ones were so frequently reprinted, that it can no longer be told which belonged really to the first edition.

It is impossible, and would be useless, for us to attempt any description of the whole series of Letters. We have thought it right to dwell at some length on the first two, because they enter so directly into the controversy betwixt Pascals friends and the Sorbonne, and because they are really, in some respects, the cleverest, if not the most valuable. The third Letter, on the Censure of M. Arnauld, and again, the three concluding Letters, {133} are closely connected with the first two. Their object, in one form or another, is the defence of the Jansenist doctrine, and of the Port Royalists, as its supporters. The intervening twelve Letters stand quite by themselves. They open up the whole subject of the moral theology of the Jesuits, and constitute the most powerful assault probably ever directed against it. The subject is one which, in a volume like this, we can only touch upon, and this more with the view of drawing out the marked literary features of Pascals assault, than of meddling with the merits of the controversy which he waged so relentlessly. In the meantime, we must wind up, as briefly as possible, the more personal aspects of the controversy.

Between the date of the second and the third Letter, the process before the Sorbonne had been finished, and M. Arnaulds censure pronounced. The third Letter deals with this censure. The writer represents the long preparation for it, the manner in which the Jansenists had been denounced as the vilest of heretics, the cabals, factions, errors, schisms, and outrages with which they have been so long charged. Who would not have thought, in such circumstances, that the blackest heresy imaginable would have come forth under the condemning touch of the Sorbonne? All Christendom waited for the result. It was true that M. Arnauld had backed up his opinions by the clearest quotations from the Fathers, expressing apparently the very things with which he had been charged. But points of difference imperceptible to ordinary eyes would no doubt be made clear under the penetration of so many learned doctors. Thoughts of this kind kept everybody in a state of breathless suspense waiting for the result. But, alas! how has the expectation been balked! Whether the Molinist doctors have not deigned to lower themselves to the level of instructing us, or for some other secret reason, they have done nothing else than pronounce the following words: This proposition is rash, impious, blasphemous, deserving of anathema, and heretical!

It was not to be wondered at, in the circumstances, that people were in a bad humour, and were beginning to think that after all there may have been no real heresy in M. Arnaulds proposition. A heresy which could not be defined, except in general terms of abuse, seemed at the least doubtful. The writer is puzzled, as usual, and has recourse to one of the most intelligent of the Sorbonnists who had been so far neutral in the discussion, and whom he asks to point out the difference betwixt M. Arnauld and the Fathers. The intelligent Sorbonnist is amused at the naïveté of the inquiry. Do you fancy, he says, that if they could have found any difference they would not have pointed it out? But why, then, pursues the ingenuous inquirer, should they in such a case pass censure?

How little you understand the tactics of the Jesuits! is the answer. How few will ever look into the matter beyond the fact that M. Arnauld is condemned! Let it be only cried in the streets, Here is the condemnation of M. Arnauld! This is enough to give the Jesuits a triumph with the unthinking populace. This is the way in which they live and prosper. Now it is by a catechism in which a child is made to condemn their opponents; now by a procession, in which Sufficient Grace leads Efficacious Grace in triumph; and by-and-by by a comedy, in which the devils carry off Jansen; sometimes by an almanac; and now by this censure. The truth is, that it is M. Arnauld himself, and not merely his opinions, that are obnoxious. Even M. le Moine himself admitted that the same proposition would have been orthodox in the mouth of any other; it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that the Sorbonne have condemned it. . . . Here is a new species of heresy, concludes the writer. It is not the sentiments of M. Arnauld that are heretical, but only his person. It is a case of 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 can say against him. Whatever he may do, unless he cease to exist he will never be a good Catholic. The grace of St Augustine will never be the true grace while he defends it. It would be all right were he only to combat it. This would be a sure stroke, and almost the only means of establishing it and destroying Molinism. Such is the fatality of any opinions which he embraces.

In the three concluding Letters, as we have said, Pascal reverts to the special subject of Jansenism and Port Royal. These Letters are considerably longer than the opening ones. It is of the sixteenth, in fact, that he makes the well-known remark, that it was very long because he had no time to make it shorter. Upon the whole, also, these Letters are less happy in style and manner. It is evident that Pascal, if he gave blows which made his opponents and the opponents of Port Royal wince, also received some bruises in return. The shamelessness of the attacks made upon his friends and himself, contemptible as they were in their nature, left scars upon a mind and temper so sensitive and reserved as his. The insufferable audacity with which holy nuns and their directors had been charged with disbelieving the mysteries of the faith was a crime which God alone was capable of punishing. To bear such a charge required a degree of humility equal to that of the nuns themselvesto believe it, a degree of wickedness equal to that of their wretched defamers. As for himself, it seemed enough to say of him that he belonged to Port Royal, as if it were only at Port Royal that there could be found those capable of defending the purity of Christian morality. He knew and honoured the work of the pious recluses who had retired to that monastery, although he had never had the honour of belonging to them. And in the seventeenth Letter he says:

I have no more to say than that I am not a member of that community, and to refer you to my letters, in which I have declared that I am a private individual; and again in so many words that I am not of Port Royal. . . . You may touch Port Royal if you choose, but you shall not touch me. You may turn people out of the Sorbonne, but that will not turn me out of my lodging.

These statements, of course, are to be received as so far a part of the disguise under which Pascal pursued his task. It was true that he had no official connection with Port Royal, that he was under no rule to live in its retirements, and that he was only occasionally found there. He was singularly free, without engagements, entanglement, relationship, or business of any kind. All the same he was a Port Royalist in sympathy and community of opinion. The interests of Port Royal were his interests, and its friends his friends. His own sister was one of its zealous inmates. There is a certain force, therefore, in the taunt that Pascal, in unmasking the duplicity of the Jesuits, did not hesitate to imitate it. His statements are not beyond the licence accorded to those who would drive an enemy off the scent, and shelter themselves within an anonymity which they have chosen to assume; but they are none the less artful and misleading. They justify themselves as the fence of the littérateur, hardly as the armour of the moralist. But the truth is, that long before this Pascal had warmed to his work as a controversialist. He was determined to give no advantage, and to spare no weapons within the bounds of decency, that might make the Jesuits feel the force of his assault. Their accusation of heresy especially exasperated him.

When was I ever seen at Charenton? {138} he says in the seventeenth Letter, addressed to the Jesuit Father Annat. When have I failed in my presence at mass, or in my Christian duty to my parish church? What act of union with heretics, or of schism with the Church, can you lay to my charge? What council have I contradicted? What Papal constitution have I violated? You must answer, father; elseyou know what I mean.

The Jansenist doctrine of grace, as we have already explained, approached indefinitely the doctrine of Calvin. Both were derived from Augustine; and St Thomas, as his interpreter, handed on to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the precious deposit. The line of thought was continuous, and it was not easy to break it at Calvin, and isolate him as a heretic, while holding to other teachers as Catholic and orthodox. This was the dilemma of the New Thomists, so pithily expressed by one of themselves in the second Letter. But it was also Pascals own dilemma; and the consciousness which he and his friends had of the nearness of the Jansenist doctrine to that of Calvin, made them all the more sensitive under the charge of heresy. The Jesuits had art enough to see the advantages which came from this association. The Port Royalists and Pascal failed in the magnanimity which clung to a truth no less because it was identified with an abused name. They insisted upon distinguishing between the tenets of Jansen and Calvinism. If what the Papal decree meant and the Sorbonne meant in the condemnation of the Jansenist proposition was that they condemned the doctrines of Calvin, then they were all agreed.Jesuits, Jansenists, and Port Royalists.

Was that all you meant, father? asks Pascal in his concluding Letter. Was it only the error of Calvin that you were so anxious to get condemned under the name of the sense of Jansen? Why did you not tell us this sooner? you might have saved yourself a world of trouble; for we were all ready without the aid of bulls or briefs to join with you in condemning that error. . . . Now, when you have come the length of declaring that the error which you oppose is the heresy of Calvin, it must be apparent to every one that they [the Port Royalists] are innocent of all error; for so decidedly hostile are they to this, the only error with which you charge them, that they protest by their discourses, by their books, by every mode, in short, in which they can testify their sentiments, that they condemn that heresy with their whole heart, and in the same manner in which it has been condemned by the Thomists, whom you acknowledge without scruple to be Catholics.

The professed point of difference stated in the same Letternamely, that the Thomists and Sorbonnists (and of course the Port Royalists with them) held that efficacious grace is resistible, while Calvin held that it was irresistiblemay or may not hold in reference to special expressions of Calvin. But there is nothing, upon the whole, stronger in Calvin than there is in Augustine on the subject of grace; and on the other hand, an efficacious grace, which is resistiblewhich the human heart can accept or repel at willseems open to all the ironical play which Pascal directs so skilfully in his first Letters against the Jesuit doctrine of a sufficient grace which is not yet sufficient. The truth is, that apart from verbal subtleties, which Pascal could handle no less familiarly, only far more skilfully, than his adversaries, there is no rational position intermediate between the Pelagian doctrine (which is also substantially the Aristotelian) of free will and moral habit, and the Augustinian doctrine of Divine grace and spiritual inspiration. The source of character is either from within the character itself, which has power to choose good and to be good if it will, or it is from a higher sourcethe grace of God, and the power of a Divine ordination. These are the only real lines of controversy. The Christian thinker may decline controversy on such a subject altogether, acknowledging that the mystery of character is in its roots beyond our ken,that we know not, and in the nature of the case cannot know, where the Human ends and the Divine begins. In such a case there is no room for argument. But we cannot with consistency step off one line on to the other. In other words, we cannot logically abuse Calvin while we hold with Augustine, or profess to revere St Thomas while we abuse Jansen.

But it is more than time to turn from this side of the Provincial Letters. This was the controversy out of which they sprangwhich mingles itself most with the personality of Pascaland hence it has claimed a somewhat detailed treatment. The great subject to which the intervening and chief portion of the Letters is directed is not, indeed, more important in itself, but it is more diversified, and more practically interesting. Here, however, Pascal was more obviously performing a task than in the other Letters. He was speaking less out of his heart. Having grappled with the Jesuits, and noticed their tactics in the affair of the Sorbonne, he is led to look into their whole system. He takes up their books and studies them, in part at least; while his friends Nicole and Arnauld also study them for him. And the result is the remarkable and memorable assault contained in his thirteen Lettersfrom the fourth to the sixteenthdirected against all the main principles of the Jesuit system.

It would lead us quite away from our purpose to enter into the range of this great controversy, or to endeavour to estimate its value, or the merits of the attack and defence on particular points. The subject is one by itself, more or less entering into the whole question of morals, and especially the immense fabric of casuistry or moral theology built up by successive teachers in the Jesuit schools. Trained, as he was, a devout disciple of the Roman Church, enthusiastic on behalf of its doctrines and preachers, Pascal had apparently no knowledge of the details of Jesuit doctrine and morality before he began his task of inquiry and assault. Austere and simple in his own principles of virtue, direct and unbending in his modes of action, he was evidently appalled by the study of the Jesuit system, and the endless complexities of compromise and evasion which it presented. In seizing, as he did everywhere, upon the immoral aspects of the system, and touching them with the most graphic colours of exposure, he cannot be said to be unfair; for the materials with which he dealt were all abundant in their writings. His quotations may be sometimes taken at random, and may set forth, without any of the alleviating shades surrounding them in their proper context, special points as parts of a general sequence of thought. They were, no doubt, often furnished to him by Nicole or Arnauld, who hunted them through the immense volumes of casuistical divinity in which they were contained. But there is no reason to suppose that in any case he has been guilty of misquotation, or that he has attributed sentiments to the Jesuit doctors not to be found in them. This is very much his own statement:

I have been asked if I have myself read all the books which I have quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so, I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad books; but I have read Escobar twice through, and I have employed some of my friends in reading the others. But I have not made use of a single passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and without having read what went before and followed, so that I might run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have been blameworthy and unfair.

No doubt this is true. There is all, and more than all, that Pascal quoted to be found in the Jesuit writings, and his own language is not too strong in speaking of much that he quotes as abominable. Notwithstanding, it may be said that the effect of his representation is a certain unfairness towards the Jesuits. He presses them at a cruel advantage when he insists upon developing from his own point of view, or still more from the mouth of some of their too simple followers, all the practical consequences of their special rules. The system of casuistry was one not solely of Jesuitical invention. It was the necessary outgrowth of the radical Roman principle of Confession. Nay, it flourished to some extent within the Protestant Church itself in the seventeenth century, as the writings of two very different men, Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter, show. Once admit the principle of directing the conscience by external rather than internal authority, and you lay a foundation upon which any amount of folly, and even crime, may be built up. This was the general principle of Jesuitism as a system of education; but it came to it from the Church which Pascal, no less than the Jesuits, revered. Nay, it was in its general character a principle as characteristic of Port Royal as of Loyola and his followers. There is the enormous difference, no doubt, that the ethics of Port Royal were comparatively faithful to the essential principles of morality which Nature and the Gospel alike teachthat its practical excesses were quite in a different direction from the laxity of the Jesuits. But two things are to be remembered, not in favour of the Jesuits, but in explanation of their excesses: 1st, that they aimed, as Pascal himself points out, at governing the world, and not merely a sectthat their whole idea of the Church in relation to the world was different from that of the Port Royalists; and 2d, that their system of morals not merely rested on a wrong and dangerous principle (which Pascals no less did), but had been endlessly developed in their schools by many inferior hands. This was Pascals great weapon against them, and so far it was quite a legitimate weapon, as he himself claimed. As none of their books could appear without sanction, the Order was more or less responsible for all the frightful principles set forth in some of these books. All the same, it is not to be presumed that such a system of moral, or rather immoral, consequences was deliberately designed by the Society. Pascal himself exempts them from such a charge. Their object, he says, is not the corruption of manners; . . . but they believe it for the good of religion that they should govern all consciences, and so they have evangelical or severe maxims for managing some sorts of people, while whole multitudes of lax casuists are provided for the multitude that prefer laxity. {144a} The Jesuit system of morality, in short, was the growth of the Jesuit principle of accommodation, added on to the Roman principle of external authority. Looking at morality entirely from without, as an artificial mode of regulating life and society for the supreme good of the Church, the Jesuit casuists were driven, under the necessities of such a system, from point to point, till all essential moral distinction was lost in the mechanical manipulations of their schools. Whatever happened, no man or woman was to be lost to the Church; the complications of human interest and passion were to be brought within its fold and smoothed into some sort of decent seeming, rather than cast beyond its pale and made the prey of its enemies. {144b} The task was a hopeless one. In the pages of Pascal the Jesuits too obviously make a deplorable business both of religion and morality. But they were as much the victims as the authors of a system which Rome had sanctioned, and which came directly from the claims which it made to govern the world not merely by spiritual suasion, but by external influence. Jesuitism may be bad, and the Jesuit morality exposed by Pascal abominable, but the one and the other are the natural outgrowth of a Church which had become a mechanism for the regulation of human conduct, rather than a spiritual power addressing freely the human heart and conscience.

Our space will not admit of an analysis of the thirteen Letters dealing with the Jesuits, and we can hardly give any quotations from them. Suffice it to say, that Pascal passes in the fourth Letter to a direct assault upon the Society. Nothing can equal the Jesuits, the Letter begins. I have seen Jacobins, doctors, and all sorts of people; but such a visit as I have made today baffles everything, and was necessary to complete my knowledge of the world. He then describes his visit to a very clever Jesuit, accompanied by his trusty Jansenist friend, and gradually unfolds from the mouth of the former the whole system of moral theology which had grown up in the Jesuit schools,their notions of actual grace, or the necessity of a special conscious knowledge that an act is evil, and ought to be avoided, before we can be said to be guilty of sin in committing the act; their famous doctrines of probabilism and of directing the intention, and all the consequences springing out of them. Nothing can be more ingenious than the manner in which the Jesuit is led forward to unfold point after point of his hateful system, as if it were one of the greatest boons which had ever been invented for mankind, until from concession to concession he is plunged into the most horrible conclusions, and the Jansenist can stand the disclosures no longer, but breaks forth in the end of the tenth Letter into a powerful and eloquent denunciation of the doctrines to which he has been listening.

Any lighter vein that may have lingered in the Letters is abandoned from this point. Pascal ceases to address his friend in the country; the playful interchange that sprang from the idea of a third party, to whom Pascal was supposed to be merely reporting what he had heard, occurs no more. He turns to the Jesuit fathers directly, and addresses them, as if unable any longer to restrain his indignation, commencing the eleventh Letter with an admirable defence of his previous tone, and of the extent to which he had used the weapon of ridicule in assailing them, and passing on to reiterate his charges, and to repel the calumnies with which they had assailed him and his Port Royalist friends. The reader may weary, perhaps, for a little, as he threads his way through the successive accusations, and the monotonous train of evil principles which underlies them all, more or less. He may wish that Pascal had gone to the roots of the system more completely, and had laid bare its germinal falsehood, instead of heaping detail upon detail, and always adding a darker hue to the picture which he draws. But any such mode of treatment would not half so well have served his purpose. His audience were not prepared for any philosophy of exposure, still less for any attack upon the essential principles of the Church; he himself did not see how the successive laxities which he fixes with his poignant satire, or sets in the light of his withering scorn, spring from a vicious conception of Christianity and of the office of the Church. He does what he does, however, with exquisite effect; and the Jesuit Order, many and powerful as have been its opponents, never before nor since felt itself more keenly and unanswerably assailed. Many of them were forced to laugh at the picture of their own follies, and the immoral nonsense which distilled from the lips of Father Bauny and others, in explanation or defence of their practices. Read that, says the confidential Jesuit who expounds to Pascal their system: it is The Summary of Sins, by Father Bauny; the fifth edition, you see, which shows that it is a good book. In order to sin, says Father Bauny, it is necessary to know that the thing we wish to do is not good. A capital commencement, I remarked. Yet, said he, only think how far envy will carry some people. It was on this very passage that M. Hallier, before he became one of our friends, quizzed Father Bauny, saying of him Ecce qui tollit peccata mundiBehold the man who taketh away the sins of the world. {147} Then after an elaborate description of all that goes to make a sin

O my dear sir, cried I, what a blessing this will be to some friends of my acquaintance! You have never, perhaps, in all your life met with people who have fewer sins to account for! In the first place, they never think of God at all, still less of praying to Him; so that, according to M. le Moine, they are still in a 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. . . . 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 of God at all, everything would be peace with him in all time coming. Away with your half-and-half sinners who have some love for virtue! They will be damned every one of them. But as for your out-and-out sinners, hardened and without mixture, thorough and determined in their evil courses, hell is no place for them. They have cheated the devil by stern devotion to his service! {148}

It is in hits like these, everywhere scattered throughout the earlier letters, to which no translation can do justice, and which lose half their edge by being separated from their context, that the wit of Pascal shines. A more delicate, and at the same time more scathing irony, cannot be conceived. He hits with the lightest stroke, and in the most natural manner, yet his lash cuts the flesh, and leaves an intolerable smart. All that could be said in answer was, that his representations were lies. They were conscious exaggerations, no doubt, as all satirical representations are. This is of their very nature. But the extent to which they told, and the bitterness of the feeling which they excited at the time, and have continued to excite amongst the Jesuits and their friends, show how much truth there was in them. Nothing can be more pitiful and less satisfactory than mere complaints of their falsehood. Such complaints were hardly to have been expected from any other quarter than the Jesuits themselves. Yet even Chateaubriand, in his new-born zeal for the Church, could say of their author, Pascal is only a calumniator of genius. He has left us an immortal lie.

Of the graver part of the Letters, the following are the only extracts that our space will permit:



JESUIT LAXITY AND CHRISTIAN INDIGNATION.

Such is the way in which our teachers have discharged men from the painful obligation of actually loving God. And so advantageous a doctrine is this, that our Fathers Annat, Pintereau, Le Moine, and A. Sirmond even, have defended it vigorously when assailed by any one. You have only to consult their answers in the Moral Theology; that of Father Pintereau, in particular (second part), will enable you to judge of the value of this dispensation by the price which it has cost, even the blood of Jesus. This is the crown of such a doctrine. (A quotation is then given from Father Pintereau to the effect that it is a characteristic of the new Evangelical law, in contrast to the Judaical, that God has lightened the troublesome and arduous obligation of exercising an act of perfect contrition in order to be justified.) O father, said I, no patience can stand this any longer. One cannot hear without horror such sentiments as I have been listening to. They are not my sentiments, said the monk. I know that well; but you have expressed no aversion to them; and far from detesting the authors of such maxims, you cherish esteem for them. Do you not fear that your consent will make you a participator in their guilt? Was it not sufficient to allow men so many forbidden things under cover of your palliations? Was it necessary to afford them the occasion of committing crimes that even you cannot excuse by the facility and assurance of absolution which you offer them? . . . The licence which your teachers have assumed of tampering with the most holy rules of Christian conduct amounts to a total subversion of the Divine law. They violate the great commandment which embraces the law and the prophets; they strike at the very heart of piety; they take away the spirit which giveth life. They say that the love of God is not necessary to salvation; they even go the length of professing that this dispensation from loving God is the special privilege which Jesus Christ has brought into the world. This is the very climax of impiety. The price of the blood of Jesus, the purchase for us of a dispensation from loving Him! Before the incarnation we were under the necessity of loving God. But since God has so loved the world as to give His only Son for it, the world, thus redeemed by Him, is discharged from loving Him! Strange theology of our time!to take away the anathema pronounced by St Paul against those who love not the Lord Jesus Christ; to blot out the saying of St John, that he that loveth not abideth in death; and the words of Jesus Christ Himself, He that loveth me not keepeth not my commandments! In this manner those who have never loved God in life are rendered worthy of enjoying Him throughout eternity. Behold the mystery of iniquity accomplished! Open your eyes, my father; and if you have remained untouched by the other distortions of your Casuists, let this last by its excess compel you to abandon them. {150a}



DEFENCE OF RIDICULE AS A WEAPON IN CONTROVERSY.

What, my fathers! must the imaginations of your doctors pass for faithful verities? Must we not expose the sayings of Escobar, {150b} and the fantastic and unchristian statements of others, without being accused of laughing at religion? Is it possible you have dared to repeat anything so unreasonable? and have you no fear that in blaming me for ridiculing your absurdities, you were merely furnishing me with a fresh subject of arousing attack, and of pointing out more clearly that I have not found in your books any subject of laughter which is not in itself intensely ridiculous; and that in making a jest of your moral maxims, I am as far from making a jest of holy things as the doctrine of your Casuists distant from the holy doctrine of the Gospel? In truth, sirs, there is a vast difference between laughing at religion and laughing at those who profane it by their extravagant opinions. It were an impiety to fail in respect for the great truths which the Divine Spirit has revealed; but it would be no less impiety of another kind to fail in contempt for falsehoods which the spirit of man has opposed to them. . . . Just as Christian truths are worthy of love and respect, the errors which oppose them are worthy of contempt and hatred: for as there are two things in the truths of our religiona divine beauty which renders them lovable, and a holy majesty which renders them venerable; so there are two things in such errorsan impiety which makes them horrible, and an impertinence which renders them ridiculous. {151a}

Many examples from the Scriptures and the Fathers are then quoted in defence of the practice of directing ridicule against error; and he closes with a singularly appropriate passage from Tertullian: Nothing is more due to vanity than laughter; it is the Truth properly that has a right to laugh, because she is cheerfuland to make sport of her enemies, because she is sure of victory.

Do you not think, my fathers, that this passage is singularly applicable to our subject? The letters which I have hitherto written are only a little sport before the real combat. As yet I have been only playing with the foils, and rather indicating the wounds that might be given you than inflicting any. I have merely exposed your sayings to the light, without commenting on them. If they have excited laughter, it is only because they are so laughable in themselves. These sayings come upon us with such surprise, it is impossible to help laughing at them; for nothing produces laughter more than surprising disproportion between what one hears and what one expects. In what other way could the most of these matters be treated? for, as Tertullian says, To treat them seriously would be to sanction them. {151b}



APPEAL AGAINST THE JESUITS.

Too long have you deceived the world, and abused the confidence which men have put in your impostures. It is high time to vindicate the reputation of so many people whom you have calumniated; for what innocence can be so generally acknowledged as not to suffer contamination from the daring aspersion of a society of men scattered throughout the world, who, under religious habits, cover irreligious minds; who perpetrate crimes as they concoct slandersnot against, but in conformity with, their own maxims? No one can blame me, surely, for having destroyed the confidence which you might otherwise have inspired, since it is far more just to vindicate for so many good people whom you have decried, the reputation for piety they deserved, than to leave you a reputation for sincerity which you have never merited. And as the one could not be done without the other, how important was it to make the world understand what you really are. This is what I have begun to do; but it will require time to complete the work. The world, however, shall hear of you, my fathers, and all your policy will not avail to shelter you. The very efforts you make to ward off the blow will only serve to convince the least enlightened that you are afraid, and that, smitten in your own consciences by my charges, you have had recourse to every expedient to prevent exposure. {152}

The effect of the Provincial Letters was not only to alarm the Jesuits, but the Church. The scandal of their exposure was so deeply felt, that the curés of Paris and Rouen appointed committees to investigate the accuracy of Pascals quotations, and the result of their investigation was entirely in Pascals favour. This led ultimately to the matter being carried before a General Assembly of the clergy of Paris, which, however, declined to give any formal decision. In the meantime, an Apology for the Casuists was published by a Jesuit of the name of Pirot, of such a character as to increase rather than abate the scandal, and a new controversy gathered around this publication. The Sorbonne took up the question, and, after examination, condemned Pirots Apology (July 1658) as they had formerly done Arnaulds propositions, and ultimately it was included by Rome in the Index Expurgatorius, along with the Provincial Letters, to which it was designed as a reply. While the question was before the Sorbonne, the curés of Paris published various writings, under the name of Facta, in support of the conclusions to which they had come. These writings were prepared in concert with Pascal and his friends, and the second and fifth are ascribed entirely to his pen. It is even said that he looked upon the latter, in which he drew a parallel betwixt the Jesuits and Calvinists (to the disadvantage of the Protestants), as the best thing he ever did. {153} Long after Pascals death (in 1694) an elaborate answer appeared, by Father Daniel, to the Provincial Letters, under the title of Entretiens de Cléandre et dEudoxe sur les Lettres au Provincial; but notwithstanding a certain amount of learning and apparent candour, the reply made no impression upon the public. Even the Jesuits themselves felt it to be a failure. Father Daniel, it was said, professed to have reason and truth on his side; but his adversary had in his favour what goes much farther with men,the arms of ridicule and pleasantry. As late as 1851 an edition of the Letters appeared by the Abbé Maynard, accompanied by a professed refutation of their misstatements. But the truth is, Pascals work is one of those which admit of no adequate refutation. Even if it be granted that he has occasionally made the most of a quotation, and brought points together which, taken separately in their connection, have not the offensive meaning attributed to them, this touches but little the reader who has enjoyed their exquisite raillery or has been moved by their indignant denunciation. The real force of the Letters lies in their wit and eloquencetheir mingled comedy and invective. They may be parried or resentedthey can never be refuted.

We have already quoted Voltaires saying, The best comedies of Molière have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters. Bossuet, he added, has nothing more sublime than the concluding ones. They were regarded by him as models of eloquence and pleasantry, as the first work of genius that appeared in French prose. When Bossuet himself was asked of what work he would most wish to have been the author, he answered, The Provincial Letters. Madame de Sévigné writes of them (Dec. 21, 1689): How charming they are! . . . Is it possible to have a more perfect style, an irony finer, more delicate, more natural, more worthy of the Dialogues of Plato? . . . And what seriousness of tone, what solidity, what eloquence in the last eight Letters! Our Gibbon attributed to the frequent perusal of them his own mastery of grave and temperate irony. Boileau pronounced them unsurpassed in ancient or modern prose. Encomiums could hardly go higher, and yet the language of Perrault is in a still higher strain: There is more wit in these eighteen Letters than in Platos Dialogues; more delicate and artful raillery than in those of Lucian; and more strength and ingenuity of reasoning than in the orations of Cicero. Their style especially is beyond all praise. It has never been surpassed, nor perhaps equalled. There may be, as there is apt to be in all such concurrent verdicts, a strain of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed so many of the highest judges of literary form. It is not for any Englishman to challenge the verdict of a Frenchman in a matter of style.

Pascal himself evidently thought highly of his success. He liked the controversy, its excitement, and the applausive echo which followed each Letter. Like every true artist, he felt the joy and yet the gravity of his work. He took up his pen with a pleasurable sense of mastery, and yet he wrote some of the Letters six or seven times over. He spared no pains, yet he never wearied. All his intellectual life for the time was thrown into the controversy, and his most finely-tempered strokes made music in his own mind, while they carried confusion to his adversaries and triumph to his friends. The sensation made by the Letters was, of course, mainly confined to France; but the nervous Latinity of Nicole soon communicated something of the same sensation to a wider circle. {156} Pascal has himself told us that he never repented having written them, nor the amusing, agreeable, ironical style in which they were written. Even the condemnation of the Papal See, abject in some respects as was his devotion to his Church, did not move him on this point. He left on record, amongst his Thoughts, the following solemn declaration: IF MY LETTERS ARE CONDEMNED IN ROME, WHAT I CONDEMN IN THEM IS CONDEMNED IN HEAVEN. AD TUUM, DOMINE JESU, TRIBUNAL APPELLO.



CHAPTER VI. THE PENSÉES.

From Pascals finished work we turn to his unfinished Remains. The one will always be regarded as the chief monument of his literary skill, and of the executive completeness of his mind. But the other is the worthier and nobler tribute to the greatness of his soul, and the depth and power of his moral genius. Few comparatively now read the Provincial Letters as a whole; fewer still are interested in the controversy which they commemorate. But there are hardly any of higher culturenone certainly of higher thoughtfulnessto whom the Pensées are not still attractive, and who have not sought in them at one time or another some answer to the obstinate questionings which the deeper scrutiny of human life and destiny is ever renewing in the human heart. No answer may have been found in them, but every spiritual mind must have so far met in the author of the Pensées a kindred spirit which, if it has seen no farther than others, has yet entered keenly upon the great quest, and traversed with a singular boldness the great lines of higher speculation that slope through darkness up to God.