Another class of objectors, whom the Jesuits have had the good fortune to number among their apologists, are the sceptical philosophers, whose native antipathy to Jansenism, as a phase of serious religion, renders them willing to sacrifice truth for the sake of a sneer at his disciples. D’Alembert expresses his regret that Pascal did not lampoon Jesuits and Jansenists alike;[[65]] and Voltaire, in the mere wantonness of his cynical humor, if not from a more worthless motive, has appended to his high panegyric on the Provincials, already quoted, the following qualifications: “It is true that the whole of Pascal’s book is founded upon a false principle. He has artfully charged the whole Society with the extravagant opinions of some few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits, which he might with equal ease have detected among the casuists of the Dominican and Franciscan orders; but the Jesuits alone were the persons he wanted to attack. In these Letters he endeavored to prove that they had a settled design to corrupt the morals of mankind—a design which no sect or society ever had, or ever could have. But his business was not to be right, but to entertain the public.”[[66]] Every clause here contains a fallacy. The charge of party-spirit, insinuated throughout, is perfectly gratuitous. Never, perhaps, was any man more free from this infirmity than Pascal. That it was pure zeal for the morality of the Gospel which engaged him to take up his pen against the Jesuits, can be doubted by none but those who make it a point to call in question the reality of all religious conviction.[[67]] Equally unfounded is the imputation of levity. Pascal was earnest in his raillery. A deep seriousness of purpose lurked under the smile of his irony. Voltaire describes himself, not the author of the Provincials, when he says that “his business was not to be right, but to entertain the public.” As to Pascal having “endeavored to prove that the Jesuits had a settled design to corrupt the morals of mankind,” we are not surprised at Father Daniel saying so; but it is unaccountable how any but a Jesuit, who professed to have read the Letters, could advance a theory so distinctly anticipated and disclaimed in the Letters themselves. “Know, then,” it is said in letter fifth, “that their object is not the corruption of manners—that is not their design. But as little is it their sole aim to reform them—that would be bad policy.”[[68]] “Alas!” says the Jesuit, in letter sixth, “our main object, no doubt, should have been to establish no other maxims than those of the Gospel; and it is easy to see, from our rules, that if we tolerate some degree of relaxation in others, it is rather out of complaisance than design.”[[69]] In truth, nothing is more clearly marked throughout the Letters than this distinction between the design of the Society and the tendency of its policy—a distinction which leaves very small scope for the sage apophthegm of the philosophical historian. There is some reason to think that Voltaire expressed himself in this manner, with the view of procuring the recommendation of Father Latour to enter the Academy—an object for the accomplishment of which, it is well known, he made the most unworthy concessions to the Jesuits.[[70]]
Later critics, in speaking of the Provincials, have indulged in a similar strain of vague depreciation; as a specimen of which we might have referred to Schlegel, who talks of their being “nothing more than a master-piece of sophistry,”[[71]] and repeats the charge of profaneness, which Pascal has so triumphantly refuted in his eleventh letter. It would be a sad waste of time to answer this ridiculous objection. Nor will it be surprising to those who know the history of Blanco White, to find him indulging in a sceptical vein on this as on other subjects. “Pascal and the Jansenist party,” he says, “accused them of systematic laxity in their moral doctrines; but the charge, I believe, though plausible in theory, was perfectly groundless in practice. The strict, unbending maxims of the Jansenists, by urging persons of all characters and tempers on to an imaginary goal of perfection, bring quickly their whole system to the decision of experience. A greater knowledge of mankind made the Jesuits more cautious in the culture of devotional feelings. They well knew that but few can prudently engage in open hostility with what, in ascetic language, is called the world.”[[72]] The strange mixture of truth and error in this statement leaves an unfavorable impression on the mind, the fallacy of which we feel ere we have time to analyze it. It is true that nothing could be more opposite to the laxity of the Jesuits than the asceticism of Port-Royal. But it is doing injustice to Pascal to insinuate that he measured Jesuitical morality by “the strict, unbending maxims of the Jansenists;” and it is flagrantly untrue that the Jesuits merely aimed at reducing monastic enthusiasm to the standard of common sense and ordinary life. We repeat that the real charge which Pascal substantiates against them is, not that they softened the austerities of the cloister, but that they sacrificed the eternal laws of morality—not that they prudently suited their rules to men’s tempers, but that they licensed the worst passions and propensities of our nature—not that they declined urging all to forsake the world (which he never expected), but that they sought, for their own politic ends, to veil its impurities, and countenance its evil customs.
Disguising their hostility to science, under the mask of friendship to literature, the Jesuits have succeeded in making to themselves friends of many who are acquainted with them only through the medium of their writings. And it is the remarkable fact of our day, that, while on the Continent, where they are practically known, the Jesuits have enlisted against themselves the pens of its most eminent novelists, historians, and philosophers, in Protestant England it is quite the reverse. The most talented of our periodical writers have exerted all their powers to white-wash them, to paint and paper them, and set them off with ornamental designs; and where they have not dared to defend, they have tried to blunt the edge of censure against them. Following in the same line of defence, a certain class of Protestant writers, fond of historical paradox, and of appearing superior to vulgar prejudices, have volunteered to protect the Jesuits. “No man is a stranger to the fame of Pascal,” says Sir James Macintosh; “but those who may desire to form a right judgment on the contents of the Lettres Provinciales would do well to cast a glance over the Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugenie, by Bouhours, a Jesuit, who has ably vindicated his order.”[[73]] Sir James had heard, perhaps, of Father Daniel’s Entretiens de Cleandre et d’Eudoxe, but it is very evident that he had never even “cast a glance over” that book; for the work of Bouhours, which he has confounded with it, is a philological treatise, which has no reference whatever to the Provincial Letters; and yet he could say that the Jesuit “has ably vindicated his order!” Next to the art which the Jesuits have shown in smuggling themselves into places of power and trust, is that by which they have succeeded in hoodwinking the merely literary portion of society.
But, not to dwell longer on these objections, the Provincials are liable to another charge, seldomer advanced, and not so easily answered; which is, that the loose casuistical morality denounced by Pascal was not confined to the Jesuits, nor to any one of the orders of the Romish Church, much less, as Voltaire says, to “a few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits,” but was common to all the divines of that Church, and was, in fact, the native offspring and inevitable growth of the practices of confession and absolution. It is admitted that the Jesuits were mainly responsible for its preservation and propagation; that they have been the most zealous in reducing it to practice; that, even after it had incurred the anathemas of popes, bishops, and divines, and after it had been disclaimed by all the other orders of the Church, the Jesuits pertinaciously adhered to it; and that, even to this day, they have identified themselves with the worst tenets of the casuists. But Protestants writers have generally alleged, not without reason, that the corruptions of casuistical divinity may be traced from the days of Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan, whom the Church of Rome owns as authorities; that the “new casuists” merely carried the maxims of their predecessors to their legitimate conclusions; and that though condemned by some popes, the censure has been only partial, and has been more than neutralized by the condemnation of other works written against the morality of the Jesuits. Thus, in a work entitled “Guimenius Amadeus,” the author, who was the Jesuit Moya, boldly claimed the sanction of the most venerated names in favor of the modern casuists. This work, it is true, was condemned to the flames in 1680, by Pope Innocent XI., who was favorable to the Jansenists; but the Jesuits boast of having obtained other papal constitutions, reversing the judgment of that pontiff, whom they do not scruple to stigmatize with heresy.[[74]] It cannot be denied that the Jesuits have all along succeeded in obtaining for their system the sanction of the highest authorities in the Church; while those works which undertook to advocate a purer morality were printed clandestinely, without privilege or approbation, under fictitious names of authors and printers; nor can it be forgotten that the Provincial Letters, the most powerful exposure of Jesuitical morality that ever appeared, were censured at Rome, and burnt by the hands of the executioner.[[75]] In short, and without entering into the question so ingeniously handled by Nicole and other Jansenists, whether the modern casuists were justified in their excesses by the ancient schoolmen, it is undeniable that this is the weakest point of the Provincials, and one on which the thorough-going Jesuit occupies, on popish principles, the most advantageous ground. The disciples of Loyola constitute the very soul of the Papacy; and they must be held as the genuine exponents of that atrocious system of morals which, engendered in the privacy of the cloister during the dark ages, reached its maturity in the hands of a designing priesthood, who still find it too convenient a tool for their purposes to part with it.
There are other respects in which we cannot fail to detect, throughout these Letters, the enfeebling and embarrassing influence of Popery over the naturally ingenuous mind of the author. Among all the maxims peculiar to the Jesuits, none are more pernicious than those in which they have openly taught that disobedience to the Papal See releases subjects from their allegiance and oaths of fidelity to their sovereigns, and authorizes them to put heretical rulers to death, even by assassination.[[76]] On this point Pascal has failed to speak out the whole truth. Whether it may have been from genuine dread of heresy, or from a wish to spare the dignity of the pope, it is easy to see the timidity, the circumspection, the delicacy with which he touches on the point of papal authority.
The Jansenists have been called the Methodists of the Church of Rome; but the term is applicable to them rather in the wide sense in which it has been applied, derisively, to those who have sought reformation or aimed at superior sanctity within the pale of an established Church, than as applied to the party now known under that designation. They disclaimed the title of Jansenists, as a nickname applied to them by their adversaries. They held themselves to be the true Catholics, the representatives of the Church as it existed down, at least, to the days of St. Bernard, whom they termed “the last of the fathers.” They ascribed a species of semi-inspiration to the early fathers of the Church. They reverenced the Scriptures, but received them at second-hand, through the medium of tradition. To be a Catholic and a Christian were with them convertible terms. Hence the horror evinced by Pascal, in his concluding letters, at the bare thought of “heresy existing in the Church.” “Embarrassed at every step,” it has been well observed, “by their professed submission to the authority of the popes, galled and oppressed by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant errors of their Church, these good men made profession of the great truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians from the apostolic to the present times. Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to which they clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force necessary to carry them through the conflict with their atrocious enemy, ‘the Society.’ They were themselves in too many points vulnerable to close fearlessly with their adversary, and they grasped the sword of the Spirit in too infirm a manner to drive home a deadly thrust.... The Jansenists and the inmates of Port-Royal displayed a constancy that would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom; but the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an examination of the errors of the papal superstition, could spring only from a healthy form of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of religious abstraction, and the petty solicitudes of sackclothed abstinence. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not the Beast, they cringed before him; he placed his dragon-foot upon their necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to France.”[[77]]
It is the policy of the Jesuits at present, as of old, to deny, point-blank, the truthfulness of Pascal’s statements of their doctrine and policy—to reiterate the exploded charge of his having garbled his extracts—and, after affecting to join in the laugh at his pleasantry, and to forgive, for the wit’s sake, his injustice to their innocent and much-calumniated fathers, to declare that, of course, he could not himself believe the half of what he said against them, nor comprehend the profound questions of casuistry on which he presumed to argue. Under this affectation of charity, they dexterously evade Pascal’s main charges, and slyly insinuate a vindication of the heresies of which they have been convicted. Thus, in a late publication, one of their number actually attempts to vindicate the old Jesuitical doctrine of probabilism![[78]] At the same time, they retain, with undiminished tenacity, the moral maxims which Pascal condemns. The discovery lately made of the Theology of Dens, still taught by the Jesuits in Ireland, is a proof of this; for it is nothing more than a collection of the most wicked and obscene maxims of casuistical morality. Matters are no better in France. Dr. Gilly mentions a publication issued at Lyons, in 1825, which is so bad that the reviewer says, “We cannot, we dare not copy it; it is a book to which the cases of conscience of Dr. Sanchez were purity itself.”[[79]] The disclosures made still more recently by M. Michelet and M. Quinet, are equally startling, and will, in all probability, issue in another expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
The policy of the Society, as hitherto exhibited in the countries where they have settled, describes a regular cycle of changes. Commencing with loud professions of charity, of liberal views in politics, and of an accommodating code of morals, they succeed in gaining popularity among the non-religious, the dissipated, and the restless portion of society. Availing themselves of this, and carefully concealing, in a Protestant country, the more obnoxious parts of their creed, their next step is to plant some of the most plausible of their apostles in the principal localities, who are instructed to establish schools and seminaries on the most charitable footing, so as to ingratiate themselves with the poor, while they secure the contributions of the rich; to attack the credit of the most active and influential among the evangelical ministry; to revive old slanders against the reformers; to disseminate tracts of the most alluring description; and, when assailed in turn, to deny everything and to grant nothing. Rising by these means to power and influence, they gradually monopolize the seats of learning and the halls of theology—they glide, with noiseless steps, into closets, cabinets, and palaces—they become the dictators of the public press, the persecutors of the good, and the oppressors of all public and private liberty. At length, their treacherous designs being discovered, they rouse against themselves the storm of natural passions, which, descending on them first as the authors of the mischief, sweeps away along with them, in its headlong career, everything that bears the aspect of that active and earnest religion, under the guise of which they had succeeded in duping mankind.
What portion of this cycle they have reached among us, it is needless to demonstrate. They have evidently got beyond the first stage; and it is highly probable that, in proof of it, the present publication may elicit a more than ordinary exhibition of their skill in the science of defamation and denial. It is far from being unlikely that, at the present point of their revolution, they may find it their interest, after all the mischief that Pascal has done them, and all the ill that they have spoken against Pascal, to claim him as a good Catholic, and take advantage of the prestige of his name to insinuate, that the Church which could boast of such a man is not to be lightly esteemed. And, in fact, it requires no small exercise of caution to guard ourselves against such an illusion. It is difficult to characterize Popery as it deserves without apparent uncharitableness to individuals, such as Fenelon and Pascal, who, though members of a corrupt Church, possessed much of the spirit of true religion. But, though it would be impossible to class such eminent and pious men with an infidel cardinal or a Spanish inquisitor, it does not follow that they are free from condemnation. It has been justly remarked, that “their example has done much harm, and been only the more pernicious from their eminence and their virtues. It is difficult to calculate how much assistance their well-merited reputation has given to prop the falling cause of Popery, and to lengthen out the continuance of a delusion the most lasting and the most dangerous that has ever led mankind astray from the truth.”[[80]] With regard to our author, in particular, it may be well to remember, that he was virtuous without being indebted to his Church, and evangelical in spite of his creed; that his piety, for which he is so much esteemed by us, was the very quality that exposed him to odium and suspicion from his own communion; that the truths, for his adherence to which we would claim him as a brother in Christ, were those which were reprobated by the authorities of Rome; and that the following Letters, for which he is so justly admired, were, by the same Church, formally censured and ignominiously burnt, along with the Bible which Pascal loved, and the martyrs who have suffered for “the truth as it is in Jesus.”