they wanted to attract to them. After having softened what the doctrines of Predestination and Grace have too harsh in appearance, they did the same with what the ties imposed by Christianity have too difficult. Great personages, for the most part, are, by the fault of their education, superstitious, ignorant, and given up to their passions. The Jesuits permitted them to have mistresses, provided they displayed a zeal for religion, and an attachment to its outward forms, which are no more than a kind of amusement when the passions are satisfied, and which serve besides, to consciences that are but ill enlightened, by way of a quieter, or, if you will, a palliative in their hours of remorse. They followed pretty nearly the same plan with regard to all those whom they directed, and succeeded in making, by these means, a great number of partisans. The Jesuitical spirit, in the manner of teaching religion, is pretty well described in the definition which the Abbé Boileau gave of these fathers: “They are (said he) a people who lengthen the creed, and shorten the decalogue.” I cannot help remarking, on this occasion, one singular contradiction of the human mind in matters of religion. The Jansenists are at once what it seems impossible to be at the same time, Predestinarians in opinion, and Rigorists in morality: they say to man, “You have great duties to fulfill, but you can do nothing of yourself; and whatever you do, what human virtues soever you practise, every one of your actions will be A NEW CRIME; at least unless God sanctify you by his grace, which you will not obtain if you are not predestined to it gratuitously and before the foreknowledge of your merits.” It must be confessed, that this doctrine is mild, adapted to consolation, and above all consistent! But in these sorts of matters, the business is not to be consistent and reasonable; it is the temper of the person who dogmatises, and not logic, that dictates to him what he is to preach. The Jansenist, unpitying in his nature, is equally so, both in his doctrines and in the morality which he teaches; he is little embarrassed that the one is contrary to the other: the nature of the God that he preaches (and who, happily for us, is only his own) is to be harsh as himself, both in what he would have us do, and in what he wills that we should believe. What would be thought of a monarch, who should say to one of his subjects, “You have irons on your legs, and you have not the power to take them off; however I now inform you, that if you walk not presently, both for a long time, and very upright, on the brink of the precipice on which you now stand, you shall be condemned to eternal punishment[9]?” Such is the God of the Jansenists; such is their theology in its original and primitive purity. Pelagius, in his error, was more reasonable. He said to man, “You can do every thing; but you have a great deal to do.” This doctrine was less shocking to reason; but, however, very incommodious