great world of Paris, and that nothing | The world is very evil, the times are waxing could be done in a corner. The bishops

late;

gate,

and even the saints of those days were Be sober and keep vigil, the Lord is at the men of the world; Saint François de Sales interested himself in the fortunes of Port is the watchword of such. It was that of Royal, and was a correspondent of La the nuns and the brethren of Port Royal. mère Angélique; Richelieu and after-"Between us and you," they seemed to wards Mazarin were ministers on whose say, "there is a great gulf fixed," and they will and word depended the imprisonment who would cross to us must leap; there or release of the Port Royal solitaries in are no bridges, and the return is attended the time of trouble; the shades of theo- with deadly peril. Oh, high ascetic souls, logical dogma were eagerly debated in such as was Augustine, when once the fashionable salons; the Church and the call of the divine voice was heard; and à world crossed and mingled very strangely Kempis, by the rolling sea; and Pascal, - strangely because it was a time of mon- as a solitary of Port Royal; have ye ever strous corruption in politics and of wan- asked yourselves how your view is to be ton license in morals. reconciled with the existence of the world? The law is laid down, God and his will are supreme; if he calls and infuses his grace into the heart man can but obey, the consequence is in God's hands.

It would be impossible, however, to go at any length into the controversies which arose between the two parties in the Church, and especially in France, on the doctrines of grace, as laid down by St. Augustine, and as interpreted by Jansenius; enough to say that the Jesuits were the chief representatives of one party in the controversy, the Port Royalists, and pre-eminently at first M. de Saint Cyran, the director, were the representatives of the other. The dead embers of this theological controversy can scarcely be blown into light and fire by even the breath of one so eloquent as the great French critic and historian of our time, Sainte-Beuve; and it is better to turn from its ephemeral phases, once so important, to the moral question which underlay the whole difference between the Jesuits and their oppo

nents.

Given and the point is assumed in the very existence of a Church, an Ecclesia, those called out of a larger body - that the world is corrupt, and that the function of a Church is to save, if not the world, at any rate the souls of the men who come under its influences, the modes in which this is to be done divide themselves sharply into two, each of which has its logical and consistent basis. One is the mode of which monasticism is the highest expression. "The world is rush ing to its ruin, come out and be ye separate" is the cry of those whose view of life is that of religious pessimism. And though, as matter of fact, only a limited number can act on the impulse or obey the call, yet separation, solitude, family life minimized, statesmanship regarded as an inferior and worldly occupation, the enormous danger of those entangled with the things of this life, the few that are saved: these are the considerations to be kept ever before the minds of men.

On the other hand there have been, and always will be, those who, without setting for themselves a lower personal standard than the others, aim at establishing a mo dus vivendi between the world and the Church. The law remains, but its rules are rather to show the ideal than the actual. "Thou shalt not kill" - true, but, if taken literally, how does the soldier differ from the assassin, the hangman from the criminal he executes? "Thou shalt not lie"- but what of him who, tender-hearted, sends the hunters on the track the hare has not taken; or who uses an equivoque or even direct false statement to save a human life? "Thou shalt not steal" but can any one class the mother who takes a loaf for her starving child with the ordinary thief? Now the moment that the smallest deviation is allowed, cases of conscience arise, and a whole casuistry grows up, which almost all would admit must be scientific rather than haphazard, to be defined at will by each more or less rigid moralist. The school which within the Church has most made casuistry a study and a science finds its culmination and its aptest expression in the Jesuits; who at the time of the Port Royal reform were the chief relig. ious directors of society, and had estab lished a modus vivendi between the world and the Church.

No one who reads the lives of the early Jesuits can doubt for a moment the purity of their intentions, the personal holiness of their lives, and their hatred of sin. The society was originally founded in or der to the propagation of the faith and the conversion of infidels; and it was not unnatural that, existing for that end, and

the most scientific men of Paris; at nineteen he invented the calculating machine; he was only twenty-three when his experi. ments on the vacuum, in support of Torricelli's hypothesis, took its place forever among renowned treatises. But his actual reading was at all times narrow. He had little Latin and less Greek; Montaigne, Corneille, and Mlle. De Scudéry were his favorite modern authors. Madame Per. rier, his elder sister, was a tender and pious woman, who admired, though she never quite understood, her brother, and afterwards became his biographer, working with the Port Royalists as editor of his remains.

cated by his father on account of his pre- | teen when his studies on conic sections carious health. His mother had died were thought worthy of being read before when he was eight years old. Etienne Pascal appears to have been a pious but stern person, by no means disposed to entertain or allow any undue exaltation in religion; and thus, unlike the Arnaulds, refused, to the end of his life, permission that his daughter Jaqueline, who had an earnest desire for a cloistered life, should take the veil. But he had the usual faiths and superstitions of his time, and a very singular affair, wherein he played a part, which of course became a matter of family tradition, had, as it would seem, no small share in forming the mind of his son, dis posing him to accept the uncommon modes of divine or supernatural manifestation about which most men require greater But Jaqueline, the younger sister, was evidence than is usually forthcoming. a very different person. Thwarted during When Blaise Pascal was a year old, a her father's lifetime in her desire of be woman reputed among the peasantry of coming a nun of Port Royal, she lived in Auvergne to be a sorceress, and whom her own home as austere a life as though his father refused to aid in a lawsuit, was she had been professed without fire in supposed to have bewitched the infant, the coldest weather, spending her whole who forthwith began to pine visibly away. time in prayer, in hard manual labor, and M. Pascal, who for some time paid no at- in nursing the sick. On Etienne Pascal's tention to the gossip, at last grew alarmed, death she entered Port Royal, and became and threatening the woman with the direst one of the most enthusiastic and the most pains and penalties, brought her to con- strict of that rigid rule. It was characterfess that she had indeed bewitched the istic of the Jansenist movement that it so child, and that his sickness was unto often took hold of entire families, and not death. The only remedy was that the of isolated members only. But while the charm should be laid on some one else, a whole Pascal family obeyed the influence, life for a life, but as the exchange with a it was felt in its extreme form by Jaque human being was not to be thought of, line and Blaise. With him, however, as she consented to take a cat. Undeterred he would have been the first to admit, by the remonstrances of two monks who there was a certain struggle against his came to console Madame Pascal, the fam-calling. He was twice converted. In ily gave her the cat, and with a plaister 1646 his father, having broken his thigh made from herbs plucked before sunrise from a fall on the ice at Rouen, came unby a girl under seven years old, and no der the influence of two members of the doubt bruised down with the cat's blood, Jansenist body at that place, who attended the sick infant recovered, predisposed to him in his illness; and from this dated accept the miracle of the holy thorn, and the more serious thought of the family. other occurrences of the like nature. But But Blaise Pascal, having with his usual M. Pascal, who afterwards repented that enthusiasm thrown himself into geological he had in his eager desire to save his as before into mathematical studies, inchild allowed this new appeal to the pow-jured his health; he was advised to abstain ers of evil, must have seen that the witch's from intellectual labor, and returned to ability was stronger to hurt than to save, since the child's feeble health remained feeble to the end.

the world of Paris, where his friends the Duc de Roannez, the Chevalier de Méré, and M. Miton were among the best known Intellectually Blaise Pascal grew rap- and the most fashionable names. His idly to the strength and stature of a giant, father's death gave him the command of and his genius chiefly showed itself in considerable means, and he used them mathematics. He was but twelve when, freely, not at all, though it has been so without the aid of any books for his hinted, in a vicious manner, but, with no father did not approve this direction for exclusion of the pleasures of society. his thoughts he worked out for himself There is some evidence of a proposal that some of the most difficult problems re- he should marry the Duc de Roannez's solved already by Euclid; he was but fif-sister, and no doubt with some such

scheme before him he wrote his celebrated | I have separated myself from Him; I have "Discours sur les Passions de l'Amour." fled, renounced, crucified Him.

O righteous Father, the world hath not known Royal itself. That the condemned propo

defeat, so their adversaries exaggerated | The devotion and the goodness of indithe victory. A confessor at St. Sulpice viduals is admitted, but the word Jesuit is refused absolution to a parishioner, be still the synonym in many quarters for all cause he had a Jansenist residing in his that is sly and underhand, even where the house, and had sent his granddaughter to charge of lax morality in other matters is school at Port Royal. Hence pamphlets for the time in abeyance. Sainte-Beuve and letters from M. Arnauld to the Sor- goes so far as to say: "If we take them bonne, a recrudescence of irritating con- one by one, they are often excellent peotroversies without much point, and on ple, honorable in spite of all their subtle. which, being in Latin, the public at large ty; there have been among them men of could form no opinion. It was at this vast erudition, of heroic devotion. But if point that Pascal dashed into the contro- we take the whole of their conduct and versy with his "Letters to a Provincial," their influence, our tone must change. the first three having reference to the spe- The individuals may be in general good, cial matter in dispute between M. Arnauld but the body, and the spirit of the body, and the Sorbonne; after which, no longer are detestable." He quotes a certain taking a merely defensive line, he turned abbé, a friend of Grimm and Diderot, the attack against the enemy in his in- and correspondent of Mme. d'Epinay, trenched camp of morals. who said in one of his letters, " Every Jesuit was charming, moral, useful, but the society as a whole, which however is only the individuals in a body, hateful, morally corrupt, pernicious. Others may explain this strange phenomenon: I am lost when I try to do so."

It would be as impossible as it would be needless to speak at length here on the "Provincial Letters;" they would require a study to themselves, and they are noticed solely as a link in the history of the events which led to the "Pensées." To those who are unable to enter fully into the controversies of the time and to read the "Provinciales" without this were idle waste of time over an incomprehensible book the chapter in Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal will perhaps give information enough on this most interesting subject.

In the "Provinciales " Pascal found his true style, and took rank at once among the great French writers. He had prob. ably been himself unaware of his own powers, since his previous papers on the vacuum, and on his calculating machine, though clear and simple, show no trace, nor was it necessary they should show trace, of the admirable language, polished, witty, indignant, or pathetic of the "Lettres Provinciales." These contributed largely to turn the scale of feeling for the time against his adversaries; they and an occurrence in which he saw the visible finger of God saved Port Royal for the time, as did also in part the acceptance of the Port Royalists of the papal bull, with whatever mental reservations they accepted it. The great strife, however, outlived Pascal, and outlived Port Royal. A century afterwards, in 1762, the society was expelled from France, as at other times it was from other countries, but always to return after a while. And in this the Jesuits have shown persistency and constancy; their labors and the record of them have filled the world; never have sufferings and martyrdom been borne more courageously than by the Jesuit fathers. The controversy is not yet closed.

This seems very like nonsense, if it does not shirk the question. To say that a congeries of sweets makes a sour, or of moral men an immoral body, is a contradiction in terms. Pascal would never have given such a crude explanation. Here is what he did say, in the fifth letter:

Know, then, that they do not intend to corrupt morals, that is not their design, but on the other hand the reformation of morals is not their sole end, which would be bad policy. Their thought is this. They have so good an opinion of themselves as to think that it is useful and even necessary to the good of religion that their credit should be everywhere extended, and that they should have sway over all consciences. And because the severe maxims of the gospel are fit to govern some kinds of people, they use them whenever these are favorable to them. But as the same maxims of men, they abandon them in regard to these, do not accord with the designs of the majority so as to be able to satisfy everybody. Making allowance for the tone of the sentence, which has a deliberate bitterness in it intended to give offence, no Jesuit need object to this, while we may even admit that the Jesuits are right, if they are to be considered, and if they consider themselves, as ruling and moving the world.

This moreover may be said without hesitation, that unless there be a certain practical giving and taking between ordinary human nature and that higher nature which is the ideal, the ordinary nature