Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which caused Pascal to write the "Letters" was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to say in them led to the development of all those qualities that are summed up in the French term l'esprit. Voltaire declared that the best comedies of Moliere n'ont pas plus de sel que les premieres lettres. "Vos maximes," Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, "ont je ne sais quoi de divertissant, qui rejouit toujours le monde," and they lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, so much so that it was clear from the first that the world in general would never ask whether Pascal had been quite fair to his opponents: "N'etes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Peres? Qu'on satisfait au precepte d'ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!" When [68] you have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ce qu'on voit. He has "salt" also, of another kind. He drives straight at the Jesuits, for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them, because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur source. What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable! And the "Letters" abound in such things. But to his comparison of Pascal with Moliere, Voltaire added that Bossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que les dernieres. And in truth the more serious note of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness came to be like some incurable malady, a visitation of God, as people used to say, is presently struck when, in the natural course of his argument, his thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms between one man or one class of men and another, deep down to those awful encounters of the individual soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal problem of predestination. In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits had presented a view of the conflict of good and evil in the soul, which is honourable to God and encouraging to man, and which has catholicity on its face. All to whom entrance into the Church, through its formal ministries, [69] lies open are truly called of God, while beyond it stretches the ocean of "His uncovenanted mercies." That is a doctrine for the many, for those whose position in the religious life is mediocrity, who so far as themselves or others can discern have nothing about them of eternal or necessary or irresistible reprobation, or of the eternal condition opposite to that.