of the Jesuit principle of accommodation, added on to the Roman principle of external authority. Looking at morality entirely from without, as an artificial mode of regulating life and society for the supreme good of the Church, the Jesuit casuists were driven, under the necessities of such a system, from point to point, till all essential moral distinction was lost in the mechanical manipulations of their schools. Whatever happened, no man or woman was to be lost to the Church; the complications of human interest and passion were to be brought within its fold and smoothed into some sort of decent seeming, rather than cast beyond its pale and made the prey of its enemies. {144b} The task was a hopeless one. In the pages of Pascal the Jesuits too obviously make a deplorable business both of religion and morality. But they were as much the victims as the authors of a system which Rome had sanctioned, and which came directly from the claims which it made to govern the world not merely by spiritual suasion, but by external influence. Jesuitism may be bad, and the Jesuit morality exposed by Pascal abominable, but the one and the other are the natural outgrowth of a Church which had become a mechanism for the regulation of human conduct, rather than a spiritual power addressing freely the human heart and conscience. Our space will not admit of an analysis of the thirteen Letters dealing with the Jesuits, and we can hardly give any quotations from them. Suffice it to say, that Pascal passes in the fourth Letter to a direct assault upon the Society. “Nothing can equal the Jesuits,” the Letter begins. “I have seen Jacobins, doctors, and all sorts of people; but such a visit as I have made today baffles everything, and was necessary to complete my knowledge of the world.” He then describes his visit to a very clever Jesuit, accompanied by his trusty Jansenist friend, and gradually unfolds from the mouth of the former the whole system of moral theology which had grown up in the Jesuit schools,—their notions of “actual grace,” or the necessity of a special conscious knowledge that an act is evil, and ought to be avoided, before we can be said to be guilty of sin in committing the act; their famous doctrines of _probabilism_ and of _directing the intention_, and all the consequences springing out of them. Nothing can be more ingenious than the manner in which the Jesuit is led forward to unfold point after point of his hateful system, as if it were one of the greatest boons which had ever been invented for mankind, until from concession to concession he is plunged into the most horrible conclusions, and the Jansenist can stand the disclosures no longer, but breaks forth in the end of the tenth Letter into a powerful and eloquent denunciation of the doctrines to which he has been listening.