When Madame du Valois, a lady of birth and high accomplishments, one of the nuns of Port-Royal, among other trials by which she was harassed and tormented for not signing the formulary condemning Jansenius, was threatened with being deprived of the benefit of the sacraments at the hour of death, she replied: “If, at the awful hour of death, I should be deprived of those assistances which the Church grants to all her children, then God himself will, by his grace, immediately and abundantly supply their instrumentality. I know, indeed, that it is most painful to approach the awful hour of death without an outward participation in the sacraments; but it is better dying to enter into heaven, though without the sacraments, for the cause of truth, than, receiving the sacraments, to be cited to irrevocable judgment for committing perjury.” (Narrative of Dem. of Port-Royal, p. 176.) Footnote 123: Will it be believed that the Jesuits actually had the consummate hypocrisy to pretend that Pascal meant to throw ridicule on the grace of God, while he was merely exposing to merited contempt their own perversions of the doctrine? Footnote 124: See before, page 70. Footnote 125: The Jesuits were notorious for the assiduity with which they sought admission into the families, and courted the confidence of the great, with whom, from the laxness of their discipline and morality, as well as from their superior manners and accomplishments, they were, as they still are, the favorite confessors. They have a maxim among their secret instructions, that in dealing with the consciences of the great, the confessor must be guided by the looser sort of opinions. The author of the _Theatre Jesuitique_ illustrates this by an anecdote. A rich gentleman falling sick, confessed himself to a Jesuit, and among other sins acknowledged an illicit intercourse with a lady, whose portrait, thinking himself dying, he gave with many expressions of remorse, to his confessor. The gentleman, however, recovered, and with returning health a salutary change was effected on his character. The Jesuit, finding himself forgotten, paid a visit to his former penitent, and gave him back the portrait, which renewed all his former passion, and soon brought him again to the feet of his confessor! Footnote 126: