A name applied to the Jesuits after Louis Molina, a Spanish Jesuit (1535–1600), whose “Scientia Media,” akin to the Arminian doctrine of Divine foreknowledge, was very famous in its day.

Beard’s Port Royal, vol. i. p. 271.  Founded on Recueil d’Utrecht, p. 278, and Sainte-Beuve, t. ii. p. 555.

M. Sainte-Beuve connects only the two concluding Letters with the first two, but the sixteenth Letter also, upon the whole, as a direct defence of Jansen and Port Royal, may be said to connect itself with these rather than with the intervening series assailing the Jesuits.  There were eighteen Letters in all published by Pascal, but there is a brief fragment of a nineteenth Letter supposed to be also from his pen, and a farther Letter from the pen of M. le Maitre on the Inquisition, commonly printed along with the others.

After the Edict of Nantes (1598), the Protestants were permitted to assemble for worship at Charenton, a small town about four miles from Paris.