The religion which we profess turns upon two points; its tenets and its morality. Among its tenets are the Trinity, the Redemption, the Real Presence, &c. which, in appearing to confound the human understanding, present to its belief only truths that are speculative in themselves: these sorts of truths, how obscure soever they seem to reason, and how much submission soever they require from it, are not those which meet with the most opposition from the multitude: naturally inclined to the marvellous, they are disposed to adopt blindly the most absurd errors in this kind, and much more the truths which are only incomprehensible, provided they oppose not their inclinations. The Jesuits therefore preached those truths in all their exactness; they knew well that they risked not much. But there are other tenets, as those of Predestination and of Grace, which border on practical religion, and which, preached in all their rigour to minds that are unprepared, would be little adapted to make proselytes. We must take great care, said the wise and pious Fleury, not to propose at once to infidels, those articles of our belief, which might shock them too much. Suppose a missionary should come and say abruptly to savages, “My children, I make known to you a God, whom you cannot serve worthily, without his special grace, which he has resolved from all eternity to give, or to refuse you.” “Very well,” the savages would say to him, “we will wait for that grace, and till it come we will remain in our present faith.” What success would the Jesuits have had, had they proceeded in this manner? Let us suppose that a Jansenist had been in their place, to preach his incomprehensible doctrine (which he calls nevertheless modestly the doctrine of St. Augustine and St. Paul) he would soon have been either abandoned as a madman, or driven away by the people with stones. The Jesuits conducted themselves much more dexterously; they proved, according to the saying of their enemies, the truth of that maxim of scripture, that the children of darkness act with more prudence in their affairs than the children of light: they preached to the people they wanted to convert that Pelagianism of which they make profession, and which is much more accommodated to the weakness and vanity of human nature; but they not only preached in a manner better suited to humanity than the Jansenists would have done; they preached also more artfully than would Pelagius himself. The heresy of that monk did not meet with the success it might have had, because it stuck half way. Pelagius, while he restored to freedom her rights, imposed on her severe ties, by the morality which he recommended to practice: this morality was that of the Christian religion in all its austerity, the renouncing of one’s-self, a penitence the most rigorous, and an eternal warfare against the passions. The Jesuits perceived that these painful duties were not made for the common run of mankind, and it was the multitude