Répandre cet esprit d’imprudence & d’erreur,
De leur destruction funeste avant-coureur.
Accordingly the Jansenists strongly assured us in their bigotted language, that the finger of God was manifest on all parts in this affair: “Alas!” replied a quondam Jesuit, seemingly consoled at being no longer of the order, “you may say, all his four fingers, and the thumb too!”
Thus then was this famous society cut off from amidst us; heaven grant that it may be without return, were it only for the sake of peace, and that we may at last be able to say, hic jacet. Its best friends (we are not afraid to assert it) are too good subjects to think the contrary: the re-establishment of this turbulent, irritated, and fanatical society, would do more hurt to the state, than it could, in the opinion even of its own partisans, do good to the church. This event (if Providence please to make it durable) will form not only an epoch, but, according to many people, a true chronological æra in the history of religion: dates will be reckoned henceforth in that history from the Jesuitical Hegira[19], at least in Portugal and in France; and the Jansenists hope, that this new ecclesiastical computation will not be long before it be admitted into other Catholic countries. This is the end of those fervent prayers which they put up to God for the greatest good of their enemies, and for bringing about “the return of the society to itself.”
Nothing will be, without doubt, more advantageous and more pleasing to them. It is well known that every Jansenist, provided he can say, with the savages in Candide, “Let us have a slice of the Jesuit,” will be at the summit of his happiness and joy: but it remains to know what profit reason (which is full as good as Jansenism) will derive at last from a proscription so greatly desired. I say reason, and not irreligion: this is a precaution necessary to be taken; for the theology of the Jansenists is, as we have seen, so reasonable, that they are apt to consider the words reason and irreligion as synonimous. It is certain that the annihilation of the society may be productive of great advantages to reason, provided the intolerant spirit of Jansenism succeed not in credit to Jesuitical intolerance; for we are not afraid to say that, between these two sects, both which are wicked and pernicious, if we were obliged to choose, and supposing them to be invested with the same degree of power, the society, which has just been expelled, would be still the least tyrannical. The Jesuits, a complaisant set of people, provided we declare ourselves not their enemies, give sufficient permission to think as we please. The Jansenists, devoid of consideration as well as abilities, will have us think just as they do: if they were masters, they would exercise over our writings, over our understandings, over our discourses, the most violent inquisition. Happily it is not much to be feared, that they will ever acquire much credit: the rigor which they profess will not make its way at court, where folks are very desirous of being Christians, but on condition that it cost them little; and their doctrine of Predestination and Grace is too harsh and too absurd not to shock their minds. Let foreigners reproach France as much as they will (it is of small importance) on the little concern she seems to take in her national theatre, so esteemed throughout all Europe, and on the distinguished favour which she bestows on her musick, though despised by all nations: those foreigners, envious of us and our enemies, will not surely ever have the melancholy advantage of reproaching our government with a more material fault, that of taking, for the object of its protection, men without talents, without understanding, unknowing and unknown; after having heretofore carried, on a violent persecution against the illustrious and respectable fathers of so pitiful a posterity. Furthermore, the nation, which begins now to be enlightened, will probably grow enlightened more and more. Disputes concerning religion will be despised, and fanaticism will be held in horror. The magistrates, who proscribed the fanaticism of the Jesuits, are men of too much understanding, too good subjects, too much fitted for the age they live in, to suffer another fanaticism to succeed it: even already some of them (among others Mr. de la Chalotais) have explained themselves so openly as to displease the Jansenists, and to merit the honour of being placed by them in the rank of philosophers. That sect seems to say like God, whose language it so often and so abusively makes use of, “He that is not for me is against me:” but it will not thereby make the more proselytes. The Jesuits were regular troops, bred and disciplined under the standard of superstition: they were the Macedonian phalanx, which it imported reason to see broken and destroyed. The Jansenists are only Cossacks and Pandours, of whom reason will have a cheap conquest, seeing they will fight singly and dispersed. In vain will they cry out as usual, that it is sufficient to shew an attachment to religion, to be reviled by modern philosophers. It will be replied to them, that Paschal, Nicole, Bossuet, and the writers of the Port-Royal, were attached to religion; and that there is not one modern philosopher (at least, one worthy of that name) who does not revere and honour them. In vain will they imagine, that because they succeeded to the Jansenism of Port-Royal, they are to succeed also to the respect which it enjoyed: it is as if the valets de chambre of a great lord should want to make themselves be styled his heirs, because they inherited a few of his cast clothes. Jansenism, in the Port-Royal, was a blemish which it effaced by great merit: in its pretended successors it is their sole existence; and what, in the age wherein we live, is an existence so poor and ridiculous?
Accordingly it need not be doubted but the destruction of their enemies will soon bring on theirs, not with violence, but by slow degrees, by insensible transpiration, and through a necessary consequence of the contempt with which that sect inspires all sensible people. The Jesuits, driven out by them, and dragging them along with themselves in their fall, may put up, from this instant, to their founder St. Ignatius, the following prayer for their enemies, “Father, pardon them, for they know not what they do.”
To speak seriously, and without circumlocution, it is time that the laws should lend reason their aid for the annihilation of that party-spirit, which has so long disturbed the kingdom with ridiculous controversies; controversies, we are not afraid to assert it, more fatal to the state than infidelity itself, when it seeks not to make proselytes. A great prince, it is said, reproached one of his officers with being a Jansenist or Molinist, I know not which: they told him he was mistaken, for that the officer was an Atheist: “If he be only an Atheist,” replied the prince, “that is another affair, and I have nothing to say to it.” This answer, which some have wanted to turn into ridicule, was however extremely wise: the prince, as head of the state, has nothing to fear from an Atheist, who is silent, and dogmatizes not. Such a wretch, while extremely culpable in the eyes of God and of reason, is hurtful only to himself, and not to others: the party-man, the disputant, disturbs society by his idle controversies. In this case that law of Solon prevails not, by which all who took not some side in the troubles of the state were declared infamous. That great legislator was too knowing to rank in this number the controversies concerning religion, so ill calculated to interest good subjects; he would rather have made it an honour to shun and to despise them.
Our gloomy theological quarrels confine not to the limits of the kingdom the injury and hurt they do us: they debase, in the eyes of Europe, our nation, already too much humiliated by her misfortunes: they make strangers, and even the Italians, say, “that the French know not how to be warm, excepting for billets of confession, or for buffoons, for the bull Unigenitus, or for the comick opera[20].” Such is the very unjust idea which a handfull of fanaticks give to all Europe of the French nation, at a time nevertheless when the truely estimable part of that nation are more enlightened than ever, more taken up about useful objects, and fuller of contempt for the follies and the men that disgrace it.
It is not only the honour of France which is interested in the annihilation of these vain disputes; the honour of religion is still more concerned in it, on account of the obstacles which they oppose to the conversion of unbelievers. I will suppose that one of those men, who have had the misfortune, in our times, to attack religion in their writings, and against whom the Jesuits and the Jansenists have equally exerted themselves, should address at the same time the two most intrepid theologists of each party, and speak to them thus: “You are right, gentlemen, to cry out shame against me, and it is my intention to repair it. Dictate to me then in concert a confession of faith proper for the purpose, and which may reconcile me first with God, and afterwards with every one of you.” On the very first article of the creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” he would infallibly set by the ears the two Catechists, by asking them if God is equally powerful over the heart and over the body? “Without doubt,” the Jansenist would aver: “Not quite so,” the Jesuit would mutter. “You are a blasphemer,” the former would cry; “And you,” would reply the second, “a destroyer of the freedom and the merit of good works.” Both addressing themselves afterward to their proselyte, would say to him, “Ah, Sir, infidelity is still better than the abominable doctrine of my adversary: beware of confiding your soul to such bad hands. If the blind,” says the Gospel, “lead the blind, they will both fall into the ditch.” It must be owned, that the blind infidel would find himself a little embarrassed between two men, who offer each to serve him as guide, and yet mutually charge each other with being blinder than him. “Gentlemen,” would he say to them, without doubt, “I thank you both for your charitable offers: God has given me, to conduct me in the dark, a staff, which is reason, and which you say will lead me to the faith: well, I will make use of this salutary staff, and I will draw from it more utility than from you two.”
Nothing more remains then to government and the magistrates, for the honour of religion and the state, than to repress, and render alike contemptible, both parties. We say it with so much the more confidence, as nobody calls in doubt the impartiality of the wise depositaries of justice, and the hearty contempt which they have for these absurd contests, the dangerous effects of which their office has required them to prevent. With what satisfaction will wise and enlightened subjects see them complete their work? Ought not the Jansenist Gazetteer and the Convulsionaries[21] to expect from them, on the first occasion, the same treatment as the Jesuits; with this difference, however, which we are to put (in point of honour) between the punishment of a revolted noblesse, and that of a turbulent populace? The Jesuits uttered their dangerous maxims in open day: the Convulsionaries and the Jansenist Gazetteer preach and print their extravagancies in the dark. The obscurity alone with which these wretches envelope themselves, can shield them from the fate which they merit: perhaps also there needs to destroy them only to drag them out of that obscurity, only to order the Convulsionaries (under pain of whipping) to exhibit their disgusting farces, not in a garret, but in a fair, for money, among dancers on the rope, and players with cups and balls, who will soon bring them down: and as to the Jansenist Gazetteer (under pain of being led through the streets upon an ass) of printing his dull libel not in his garret, but at an authorised bookseller’s, at the publisher’s, for example, of the Christian Journal, so widely circulated, and so deserving of being so. Convulsionaries and gazetteers will vanish, the moment in which they shall have lost the little merit which remains to them, that of clandestineness. In a very short time the name of the Jansenists will be forgotten, as that of their adversaries is proscribed; the destruction of the one, and the disappearance of the others, will leave no longer any trace to recollect them by: this event, like those which have preceded it, will be effaced and buried by those which shall follow; and nothing at most will remain of it but that French witticism, that the chief of the Jesuits is a broken captain, who has lost his company.