highest and most capital importance, whereby those who openly refuse to worship it are excommunicated, and those who would do so if they dared, are held in check' (_ibid._ p. 105). The object of this lengthy note is to vindicate for Sarpi a prominent and early place among those candid analysts of Jesuitry who now are lost in the great light of Pascal's genius. Sarpi's _Familiar Letters_ have for my mind even more weight than the famous _Lettres Provinciales_ of Pascal. They were written with no polemical or literary bias, at a period when Jesuitry was in its prime; and their force as evidence is strengthened by their obvious spontaneity. A book of some utility was published in 1703 at Salzburg (?), under the title of _Artes Jesuiticae_ Christianus Aletophilus. This contains a compendium of those passages in casuistical writings on which Pascal based his brilliant satires. Paul Bert's modern work, _La Morale des Jesuites_ (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), is intended to prove that recent casuistical treatises of the school repeat those ancient perversions of sound morals.] The working of the Company, as we have seen, depended upon a skillful manipulation of apparently hard-and-fast principles. The Declarations explained away the Constitutions; and an infinite number of minute exceptions and distinctions volatilized vows and obligations into ether. Transferring the same method to the sphere of ethics, they so wrought upon the precepts of the moral law, whether expressed in holy writ, in the ecclesiastical decrees, or in civil jurisprudence, as to deprive them of their binding force. The subtlest elasticity had been gained for the machinery of the order by casuistical interpretation. A like elasticity was secured for the control and government of souls by an identical process. It was no wonder that the Jesuits became rapidly fashionable as confessors. The plainest prohibitions were as wax in their hands. The Decalogue laid down as rules for conduct: 'Thou shalt not steal;' 'Thou shalt not kill;' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' Christ spiritualized these rules into their essence: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;' 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.' It is manifest that both the old and the new covenant upon which modern Christianity is supposed to rest, suffered no transactions in matters so clear to the human conscience. Jesus himself refined upon the legality of the Mosaic code by defining sin as egotism or concupiscence. But the Company of Jesus took pains in their casuistry to provide attenuating circumstances for every sin in detail. By their doctrines of the invincible erroneous conscience, of occult compensation, of equivocation, of mental reservation, of probabilism, and of philosophical sin, they afforded loopholes for the gratification of every passion, and for the commission of every crime. Instead of