[224]. The Jesuits are so fond of their “attrition,” or purely natural repentance, that one of their own theologians (Cardinal Francis Tolet) having condemned it they falsified the passage in a subsequent edition, making him speak the opposite sentiment. The forgery was exposed; but the worthy fathers, according to custom, allowed it to pass without notice, ad majorem Dei gloriam. (Nicole, iii. 95.)
[225]. Tr. 1, ex. 2, n. 21; and tr. 5, ex. 4, n. 8.
[226]. Shocking as these principles are, it might be easy to show that they necessarily flow from the Romish doctrine, which substitutes the imperfect obedience of the sinner as the meritorious ground of justification, in the room of the all-perfect obedience and oblation of the Son of God, which renders it necessary to lower the divine standard of duty. The attempt of Father Daniel to escape from the serious charge in the text under a cloud of metaphysical distinctions about affective and effective love, is about as lame as the argument he draws from the merciful character of the Gospel, is dishonorable to the Saviour, who “came not to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfil.” But this “confusion worse confounded” arises from putting love to God out of its proper place and representing it as the price of our pardon instead of the fruit of faith in pardoning mercy. Arnauld was as far wrong on this point as the Jesuits; and it is astonishing that he did not discover in their system the radical error of his own creed carried out to its proper consequences. (Reponse Gen. au Livre de M. Arnauld, par Elie Merlat, p. 30.)
[227]. “Nothing on this point,” says Nicole in a note here, “can be finer than the prosopopeia in which Despréaux (Boileau) introduces God as judging mankind.” He then quotes a long passage from the Twelfth Epistle of that poet, beginning—
“Quand Dieu viendra juger les vivans et les morts,” &c.
Boileau was the personal friend of Arnauld and Pascal, and satirized the Jesuits with such pleasant irony that Father la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV., though himself a Jesuit, is said to have taken a pleasure in repeating his verses.
[228]. In this and the following letters, Pascal changes his style, from that of dialogue to that of direct address, and from that of the liveliest irony to that of serious invective and poignant satire.
[229]. “Religion, they tell us, ought not to be ridiculed; and they tell us truth: yet surely the corruptions in it may; for we are taught by the tritest maxim in the world, that religion being the best of things, its corruptions are likely to be the worst.” (Swift’s Apology for a Tale of a Tub.)
[230]. Prov. i. 26; Ps. lii. 6; Job xxii. 19. In the first passage, the figure is evidently what theologians call anthropopathic, or speaking of God after the manner of men, and denotes his total disregard of the wicked in the day of their calamity.
[231]. In most of the editions, it is “St. Chrysostom,” but I have followed that of Nicole.