“They do not insist upon their denying the necessity of efficacious grace. This would be to press them too far. People should not tyrannise over their friends; and the Jesuits have really gained enough. But the world is content with words; and so the name of sufficient grace being received on all sides, though in different senses, none except the most subtle theologians can dream that the expression does not signify the same to the Jacobins and the Jesuits; and the result will show that the latter are not the greatest dupes.”
This conclusion becomes the subject of conversational by-play, similar to that of the first Letter:—
“I went straight,” adds the writer, “to the Jacobins, at whose door I found a good friend of mine, a great Jansenist—for you must know I have friends amongst all parties—who was inquiring for another father, different from the one I wanted. But I persuaded him to accompany me, and asked for one of my New Thomist friends. He was delighted to see me again. ‘Ah, well,’ I said to him, ‘it seems it is not enough that all men have a proximate power by which they can never act with effect; they must also have a sufficient grace, with which they can act just as little. Is not this the opinion of your school?’ ‘Yes,’ said the good father, ‘and I have this very morning been maintaining this in the Sorbonne. I spoke my full half-hour; and had it not been for the sand-glass, I bade fair to reverse the unlucky proverb which circulates in Paris—“He votes with his cap [merely by nodding his assent, without speaking] like a monk of the Sorbonne.”’ ‘And what about your half-hour and your sand-glass?’ said I. ‘Do they shape your discourses by a certain measure?’ ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘for some days past.’ ‘And do they oblige you to speak half an hour?’ ‘No, we may speak as shortly as we like.’ ‘But not,’ I said, ‘as much as you like. What a capital rule for the ignorant—what an excellent excuse for those who have nothing worth saying! But to come to the point, my father—this grace which is given to all, is it sufficient?’ ‘Yes,’ said he. ‘And yet it has no effect without efficacious grace?’ ‘Quite true,’ said he. ‘And all men have the sufficient, but not all the efficacious?’ ‘Exactly so.’ ‘That is to say,’ I urged, ‘that all have enough grace, and yet not enough—that there is a grace which is sufficient, and yet does not suffice. In good sooth, my father, that is subtle doctrine. Have you forgotten, in quitting the world, what the word sufficient means? Do you not remember that it includes everything necessary for acting? . . . How, then, do you leave it to be said, that all men have sufficient grace for acting, while you confess that another grace is absolutely necessary for acting, and that all have not this? . . . Is it a matter of indifference to say that with sufficient grace we can really act?’ ‘Indifference!’ said he; ‘why, it is heresy—formal heresy. The necessity of efficacious grace for effective action is a point of faith. It is heresy to deny this.’ ‘Where, then, are we now? and what side must I take? If I deny sufficient grace, I am a Jansenist. If I admit it, like the Jesuits, so that efficacious grace is no longer necessary, I shall be a heretic, you say. And if I admit it, as you do, so that efficacious grace is still necessary, why I sin against common-sense, I am a blockhead, say the Jesuits. What can I do in this dilemma, of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist? To what a strait are we come, if it is only Jansenists, after all, who are at variance with neither faith nor reason, and who preserve themselves both from folly and error?’”
The Dominican, in short, is made to appear very ridiculous in his union with the Jesuits. Clearly he fights on their side against the Jansenists at the expense of his honesty and consistency. He is confounded by a parable representing the absurdity of his position.
“‘It is all very easy to talk,’ was all he could say in reply. ‘You are an independent and private person; I am a monk, and in a community. Do you not understand the difference? We depend upon superiors; they depend upon others. They have promised our votes, and what would you have me to do?’ We understood his allusion, and remembered how a brother monk had been banished to Abbeville for a similar cause.”
The writer is disposed to pity the monk as he relates with a melancholy tone how the Dominicans, who had from the time of St Thomas been such ardent defenders of the doctrine of grace, had been entrapped into making common cause with the Jesuits. The latter, availing themselves of the confusion and ignorance introduced by the Reformation, had disseminated their principles with great rapidity, and become masters of the popular belief; while the poor Dominicans found themselves in the predicament of either being denounced as Calvinists, and treated as the Jansenists then were, or of falling into
the use of a common language with the Jesuits. What other course was open to them in such a case than that of saving the truth at the expense of their own credit! and while admitting the name of sufficient grace, denying, after all, that it was sufficient! That was the real history of the business.
This pitiful story of the New Thomist awakens a respondent pity in the writer. But his Jansenist companion is roused to indignant remonstrance:—
“Do not flatter yourselves,” he exclaims, “that you have saved the truth. If it had no other protector than you, it would have perished in such feeble hands. You have received into the Church the name of its enemy, and this is to receive the enemy itself. Names are inseparable from things. If the term sufficient grace be once admitted, you may talk finely about only understanding thereby a grace insufficient; but this will be of no avail. Your explanation will be held as odious in the world, where men speak far more sincerely of less important things. The Jesuits will triumph. It will be their sufficient grace, and not yours—which is only a name—which will be accepted. It will be theirs, which is the reverse of yours, that will become an article of faith.”
In vain the New Thomist proclaims his readiness to suffer martyrdom rather than allow this, and to maintain the great doctrine of St Thomas to the death. His allusion to the importance of the doctrine only calls forth more severely the indignant eloquence of the Jansenist, and he brings the Letter to a close in a passage which forestalls the graver and loftier tone of the later Letters.