“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 Letter—namely, 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 irresistible—may 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 “resistible”—which the human heart can accept or repel at will—seems open to all the ironical play which Pascal directs so skilfully in his first page 140Letters 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