第14章

What say you to that?" "Say!" I exclaimed."I am delighted! What a charming train of consequences do I discover flowing from this doctrine! I can see the whole results already; and such mysteries present themselves before me! Why, I see more people, beyond all comparison, justified by this ignorance and forgetfulness of God, than by grace and the sacraments! But, my dear father, are you not inspiring me with a delusive joy? Are you sure there is nothing here like that sufficiency which suffices not? I am terribly afraid of the Distinguo; I was taken in with that once already! Are you quite in earnest?" "How now!" cried the monk, beginning to get angry, "here is no matter for jesting.I assure you there is no such thing as equivocation here." "I am not making a jest of it, said I; "but that is what I really dread, from pure anxiety to find it true." "Well then," he said, "to assure yourself still more of it, here are the writings of M.le Moine, who taught the doctrine in a full meeting of the Sorbonne.He learned it from us, to be sure; but he has the merit of having cleared it up most admirably.

O how circumstantially he goes to work! He shows that, in order to make out action to be a sin, all these things must have passed through the mind.

Read, and weigh every word." I then read what I now give you in a translation from the original Latin: "1.On the one hand, God sheds abroad on the soul some measure of love, which gives it a bias toward the thing commanded;and on the other, a rebellious concupiscence solicits it in the opposite direction.2.God inspires the soul with a knowledge of its own weakness.

3.God reveals the knowledge of the physician who can heal it.4.God inspires it with a desire to be healed.5.God inspires a desire to pray and solicit his assistance." "And unless all these things occur and pass through the soul," added the monk, "the action is not properly a sin, and cannot be imputed, as M.le Moine shows in the same place and in what follows.Would you wish to have other authorities for this? Here they are." "All modern ones, however," whispered my Jansenist friend."So I perceive," said Ito him aside; and then, turning to the monk: "O my dear sir," cried I, "what a blessing this will be to some persons of my acquaintance! I must positively introduce them to you.You have never, perhaps, met with people who had fewer sins to account for all your life.For, in the first place, they never think of God at all; their vices have got the better of their reason; they have never known either their weakness or the physician who can cure it; they have never thought of 'desiring the health of their soul,'

and still less of 'praying to God to bestow it'; so that, according to M.le Moine, they are still in the state of baptismal innocence.They have 'never had a thought of loving God or of being contrite for their sins';so that, according to Father Annat, they have never committed sin through the want of charity and penitence.Their life is spent in a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures, in the course of which they have not been interrupted by the slightest remorse.These excesses had led me to imagine that their perdition was inevitable; but you, father, inform me that these same excesses secure their salvation.Blessings on you, my good father, for this way of justifying people! Others prescribe painful austerities for healing the soul; but you show that souls which may be thought desperately distempered are in quite good health.What an excellent device for being happy both in this world and in the next! I had always supposed that the less a man thought of God, the more he sinned; but, from what I see now, if one could only succeed in bringing himself not to think upon God at all, everything would be pure with him in all time coming.Away with your half-and-half sinners, who retain some sneaking affection for virtue! They will be damned every one of them, these semi-sinners.But commend me to your arrant sinners-hardened, unalloyed, out-and-out, thorough-bred sinners.Hell is no place for them; they have cheated the devil, purely by virtue of their devotion to his service!" The good father, who saw very well the connection between these consequences and his principle, dexterously evaded them; and, maintaining his temper, either from good nature or policy, he merely replied: "To let you understand how we avoid these inconveniences, you must know that, while we affirm that these reprobates to whom you refer would be without sin if they had no thoughts of conversion and no desires to devote themselves to God, we maintain that they all actually have such thoughts and desires, and that God never permitted a man to sin without giving him previously a view of the evil which he contemplated, and a desire, either to avoid the offence, or at all events to implore his aid to enable him to avoid it; and none but Jansenists will assert the contrary." "Strange! father,"returned I; "is this, then, the heresy of the Jansenists, to deny that every time a man commits a sin he is troubled with a remorse of conscience, in spite of which, he 'leaps the fence and transgresses,' as Father Bauny has it? It is rather too good a joke to be made a heretic for that.I can easily believe that a man may be damned for not having good thoughts; but it never would have entered my head to imagine that any man could be subjected to that doom for not believing that all mankind must have good thoughts!

But, father, I hold myself bound in conscience to disabuse you and to inform you that there are thousands of people who have no such desires- who sin without regret- who sin with delight- who make a boast of sinning.And who ought to know better about these things than yourself.? You cannot have failed to have confessed some of those to whom I allude; for it is among persons of high rank that they are most generally to be met with.