Jansenists, and to merit the honour of being placed by them in the rank of philosophers. That sect seems to say like God, whose language it so often and so abusively makes use of, “He that is not for me is against me:” but it will not thereby make the more proselytes. The Jesuits were regular troops, bred and disciplined under the standard of superstition: they were the Macedonian phalanx, which it imported reason to see broken and destroyed. The Jansenists are only Cossacks and Pandours, of whom reason will have a cheap conquest, seeing they will fight singly and dispersed. In vain will they cry out as usual, that it is sufficient to shew an attachment to religion, to be reviled by _modern philosophers_. It will be replied to them, that Paschal, Nicole, Bossuet, and the writers of the Port-Royal, were attached to religion; and that there is not one _modern philosopher_ (at least, one worthy of that name) who does not revere and honour them. In vain will they imagine, that because they succeeded to the Jansenism of Port-Royal, they are to succeed also to the respect which it enjoyed: it is as if the valets de chambre of a great lord should want to make themselves be styled his heirs, because they inherited a few of his cast clothes. Jansenism, in the Port-Royal, was a blemish which it effaced by great merit: in its pretended successors it is their sole existence; and what, in the age wherein we live, is an existence so poor and ridiculous? Accordingly it need not be doubted but the destruction of their enemies will soon bring on theirs, not with violence, but by slow degrees, by insensible transpiration, and through a necessary consequence of the contempt with which that sect inspires all sensible people. The Jesuits, driven out by them, and dragging them along with themselves in their fall, may put up, from this instant, to their founder St. Ignatius, the following prayer for their enemies, “Father, pardon them, for they know not what they do.”