CHAPTER V. THE ‘PROVINCIAL LETTERS.’

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 page 143the 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 teach—that 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 sect—that 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 Pascal’s no less did), but had been endlessly developed in their schools by many inferior hands. This was