[232]. We may be permitted to question the correctness of this interpretation, and the propriety of introducing it in the present connection. For the former, the fathers, not Pascal, are responsible; as to the latter, it was certainly superfluous, and not very happy, to have recourse to such an example, to justify the use of ridicule as a weapon against religious follies. Among other writers, the Abbé D’Artigny is very severe against our author on this score, and quotes with approbation the following censure on him: “Is it possible that a man of such genius and erudition could justify the most criminal excesses by such respectable examples? Not content with making witty old fellows of the prophets and the holy fathers, nothing will serve him but to make us believe that the Almighty himself has furnished us with precedents for the most bitter slanders and pleasantries—an evident proof that there is nothing that an author will not seek to justify when he follows his own passion.” (Nouveaux Mémoires D’Artigny, ii. 185.) How solemnly and eloquently will a man write down all such satires, when the jest is pointed against himself and his party! D’Artigny quotes, within a few pages, with evident relish, a bitter satire against a Protestant minister.
[233]. “Religious,” is a general term, applied in the Romish Church to all who are in holy orders.
[234]. “So far,” says Nicole, “from his having told all that he might against the Jesuits, he has spared them on points so essential and important, that all who have a complete knowledge of their maxims have admired his moderation.” “What would have been the case,” asks another writer, “had Pascal exposed the late infamous things put out by their miserable casuists, and unfolded the chain and succession of their regicide authors?” (Dissertation sur la foi due au Pascal, &c., p. 14.)
[235]. The apologists of the Jesuits attempted to justify this extraordinary illustration, by referring to the use which Augustine and other fathers make of the parable of the good Samaritan who “set on his own beast” the wounded traveller. But Nicole has shown that fanciful as these ancient interpreters often were, it is doing them injustice to father on them the absurdity of Father Garasse. (Nicole’s Notes, iii. 340.)
[236]. Brisacier, who became rector of the College of Rouen, was a bitter enemy of the Port-Royalists. His defamatory libel against the nuns of Port-Royal, entitled “Le Jansenisme Confondu,” published in 1651, was censured by the Archbishop of Paris, and vigorously assailed by M. Arnauld.
[237]. The priests of Port-Royal.
[238]. This is the real question, which brings the matter to a point, and serves to answer all the evasions of the Jesuits. They boast of their unity as a society and their blind obedience to their head. Have they, then, ever, as a society, disclaimed these maxims?—have they even, as such, condemned the sentiments their fathers Becan, Mariana, and others, on the duty of dethroning and assassinating heretical kings? They have not; and till this is done, they must be held, as Jesuits, responsible for the sentiments which they refuse to disavow.
[239]. Prov. xxix. 9.
[240]. This postscript, which appeared in the earlier editions, is dropt in that of Nicole and others.
[241]. Pierre du Moulin is termed by Bayle “one of the most celebrated ministers which the Reformed Church in France ever had to boast of.” He was born in 1568, and was for some time settled in Paris; but having incurred the resentment of Louis XIII., he retired to Sedan in 1623, where he became a professor in the Protestant University, and died, in the ninetieth year of his age, in 1658, two years after the time when Pascal wrote. Of his numerous writings, few are known in this country, excepting his “Buckler of the Faith,” and his “Anatomy of the Mass,” which were translated into English. (Quick’s Synodicon, ii., 105.)