But the Jansenist, keeping the monk to his own terms, addressed him as follows: “If you are willing, father, to stand or fall by Scripture, I am ready to meet you there; only you must promise to yield to its authority; and since it is written that ‘God has not revealed his judgments to the Heathen, but left them to wander in their own ways,’ you must not say that God has enlightened those whom the Sacred Writings assure us ‘he has left in darkness and in the shadow of death.’ Is it not enough to show the erroneousness of your principle, to find that St. Paul calls himself ‘the chief of sinners,’ for a sin which he committed ‘ignorantly, and with zeal?’ Is it not enough to find, from the Gospel, that those who crucified Jesus Christ had need of the pardon which he asked for them, although they knew not the malice of their action, and would never have committed it, according to St. Paul, if they had known it? Is it not enough that Jesus Christ apprizes us that there will be persecutors of the Church, who, while making every effort to ruin her, will ‘think that they are doing God service;’ teaching us that this sin, which in the judgment of the apostle, is the greatest of all sins, may be committed by persons who, so far from knowing that they were sinning, would think that they sinned by not committing it? In fine, is it not enough that Jesus Christ himself has taught us that there are two kinds of sinners, the one of whom sin with ‘knowledge of their Master’s will,’ and the other without knowledge; and that both of them will be ‘chastised,’ although, indeed, in a different manner?” Sorely pressed by so many testimonies from Scripture, to which he had appealed, the worthy monk began to give way; and, leaving the wicked to sin without inspiration, he said: “You will not deny that _good men_, at least, never sin unless God give them”——“You are flinching,” said I, interrupting him; “you are flinching now, my good father; you abandon the general principle, and finding that it will not hold good in regard to the wicked, you would compound the matter, by making it apply at least to the righteous. But in this point of view the application of it is, I conceive, so circumscribed, that it will hardly apply to anybody, and it is scarcely worth while to dispute the point.”