[120]. Etienne Bauni, or Stephen Bauny, was a French Jesuit. His “Summary,” which Pascal has immortalized by his frequent references to it, was published in 1633. It is a large volume, stuffed with the most detestable doctrines. In 1642, the General Assembly of the French clergy censured his books on moral theology, as containing propositions “leading to licentiousness, and the corruption of good manners, violating natural equity, and excusing blasphemy, usury, simony, and other heinous sins, as trivial matters.” (Nicole, i. 164.) And yet this abominable work was formally defended in the “Apology for the Casuists,” written in 1657, by Father Pirot, and acknowledged by the Jesuits as having been written under their direction! (Nicole, Hist. des Provinciales, p. 30.)
[121]. Francis Annat was born in the year 1590. He was made rector of the College of Toulouse, and appointed by the Jesuits their French provincial; and, while in that situation, was chosen by Louis XIV. as his confessor. His friends have highly extolled his virtues as a man; and the reader may judge of the value of these eulogiums from the fact, that he retained his post as the favorite confessor of that licentious monarch, without interruption, till deafness prevented him from listening any longer to the confessions of his royal penitent. (Bayle, art. Annat.) They have also extolled his answer to the Provincial Letters, in his “Bonne Foy des Jansenistes,” in which he professed to expose the falsity of the quotations made from the Casuists, with what success, appears from the Notes of Nicole, who has completely vindicated Pascal from the unfounded charges which the Jesuits have reiterated on this point. (Notes Preliminaires, vol. i. p. 256, &c.; Entretiens de Cleandre et Eudoxe, p. 79.)
[122]. 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.)
[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?
[124]. See before, page 70.
[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!
[126]. “The doubtsome faith of the pope,” as it was styled by our Reformers, is here lamentably apparent. The “fear and trembling” of the apostle were those of anxious care and diligence, not of doubt or apprehension. The Church of Rome, with all her pretensions to be regarded as the only safe and infallible guide to salvation, keeps her children in darkness and doubt on this point to the last moment of life; they are never permitted to reach the peaceful assurance of God’s love and the humble hope of eternal life which the Gospel warrants the believer to cherish; and this, while it serves to keep the superstitious multitude under the sway of priestly domination, accounts for the gloom which has characterized, in all ages, the devotion of the best and most intelligent Romanists.
[127]. Augustine.
[128]. Imago Primi Seculi.—The work to which Pascal here refers was printed by the Jesuits in Flanders in the year 1640, under the title of “L’Image du Premier Siècle de la Société de Jesus,” being a history of the Society of the Jesuits from the period of its establishment in 1540—a century before the publication. The work itself is very rare, and would probably have fallen into oblivion, had not the substance of it been embodied in a little treatise, itself also scarce, entitled “La Morale Pratique des Jésuites.” The small specimen which Pascal has given conveys but an imperfect idea of the mingled blasphemy and absurdity of this Jesuitical production.
[129]. Isa. xviii. 2.