CHAPTER V. THE ‘PROVINCIAL LETTERS.’

Pascal’s 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 page 144deliberately 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.”¹¹ 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.¹² 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 page 145natural 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.