“The sin of the Jesuits,” he says, “is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of the world _sans peur et sans reproche_, of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere in great matters—faults promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in some easy way, quite other than Pascal’s high, fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation.” In these words breathes the accent of the liberal spirit, the spirit which dares to look close into great questions; declines to admit more than it can prove, or at least infer; refuses, at whatever loss of serenity, to formulate its hopes and desires as certainties. The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is that grace is always vouchsafed in sufficient measure to overcome temptation, if only the spirit chooses to make use of it by the exercise of its free choice. “This doctrine,” says Pater, “is certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as assuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, God’s silly sheep.” Pater goes on to say, with an outspokenness which is hardly characteristic of him, that the very opposite doctrine, the Calvinistic doctrine of election both to reprobation and to salvation, would seem to be strikingly confirmed by our own experience. Pascal himself, a visibly elect soul, acting as it were by a certain irresistible impulse of holiness, is an instance in point. He makes, of course, no attempt at the solution of the insoluble difficulty. But nowhere else in the whole of his writings does he touch on the great dilemma, namely, that our consciousness tells us we are free, our reason that we are bound. He only surveys it from the spectatorial point of view. “Who,” he says, “on a survey of life from outside would willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, for which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respective points of view?” But Pater leaves us in little doubt as to the side on which his own heart was engaged. It is clear that he felt that we are not, when our humanity is sifted to the very bottom, independent beings; we are deeply involved and hampered; something outside of us and anterior to us determines our bent, our very path.