Tr. 1, ex. 2, n. 21; and tr. 5, ex. 4, n. 8. Footnote 226: Shocking as these principles are, it might be easy to show that they necessarily flow from the Romish doctrine, which substitutes the imperfect obedience of the sinner as the meritorious ground of justification, in the room of the all-perfect obedience and oblation of the Son of God, which renders it necessary to lower the divine standard of duty. The attempt of Father Daniel to escape from the serious charge in the text under a cloud of metaphysical distinctions about _affective_ and _effective_ love, is about as lame as the argument he draws from the merciful character of the Gospel, is dishonorable to the Saviour, who “came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfil.” But this “confusion worse confounded” arises from putting love to God out of its proper place and representing it as the price of our pardon instead of the fruit of faith in pardoning mercy. Arnauld was as far wrong on this point as the Jesuits; and it is astonishing that he did not discover in their system the radical error of his own creed carried out to its proper consequences. (Reponse Gen. au Livre de M. Arnauld, par Elie Merlat, p. 30.) Footnote 227: “Nothing on this point,” says Nicole in a note here, “can be finer than the prosopopeia in which Despréaux (Boileau) introduces God as judging mankind.” He then quotes a long passage from the Twelfth Epistle of that poet, beginning— “Quand Dieu viendra juger les vivans et les morts,” &c. Boileau was the personal friend of Arnauld and Pascal, and satirized the Jesuits with such pleasant irony that Father la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV., though himself a Jesuit, is said to have taken a pleasure in repeating his verses. LETTER XI. TO THE REVEREND FATHERS, THE JESUITS.[228] RIDICULE A FAIR WEAPON WHEN EMPLOYED AGAINST ABSURD OPINIONS—RULES TO BE OBSERVED IN THE USE OF THIS WEAPON—THE PROFANE BUFFOONERY OF FATHERS LE MOINE AND GARASSE. _August 18, 1656._ REVEREND FATHERS,—I have seen the letters which you are circulating in opposition to those which I wrote to one of my friends on your morality; and I perceive that one of the principal points of your defence is, that I have not spoken of your maxims with sufficient seriousness. This charge you repeat in all your productions, and carry it so far as to allege, that I have been “guilty of turning sacred things into ridicule.”