cloister during the dark ages, reached its maturity in the hands of a designing priesthood, who still find it too convenient a tool for their purposes to part with it. There are other respects in which we cannot fail to detect, throughout these Letters, the enfeebling and embarrassing influence of Popery over the naturally ingenuous mind of the author. Among all the maxims peculiar to the Jesuits, none are more pernicious than those in which they have openly taught that disobedience to the Papal See releases subjects from their allegiance and oaths of fidelity to their sovereigns, and authorizes them to put heretical rulers to death, even by assassination.[76] On this point Pascal has failed to speak out the whole truth. Whether it may have been from genuine dread of heresy, or from a wish to spare the dignity of the pope, it is easy to see the timidity, the circumspection, the delicacy with which he touches on the point of papal authority. The Jansenists have been called the Methodists of the Church of Rome; but the term is applicable to them rather in the wide sense in which it has been applied, derisively, to those who have sought reformation or aimed at superior sanctity within the pale of an established Church, than as applied to the party now known under that designation. They disclaimed the title of Jansenists, as a nickname applied to them by their adversaries. They held themselves to be the true Catholics, the representatives of the Church as it existed down, at least, to the days of St. Bernard, whom they termed “the last of the fathers.” They ascribed a species of semi-inspiration to the early fathers of the Church. They reverenced the Scriptures, but received them at second-hand, through the medium of tradition. To be a Catholic and a Christian were with them convertible terms. Hence the horror evinced by Pascal, in his concluding letters, at the bare thought of “heresy existing in the Church.” “Embarrassed at every step,” it has been well observed, “by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, galled and oppressed by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of their Church, these good men made profession of the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them through the conflict with their atrocious enemy, ‘the Society.’ They were themselves in too many points vulnerable to close fearlessly with their adversary, and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to drive home a deadly thrust.... The Jansenists and the inmates of Port-Royal displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom; but the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an