up a vast literature, at once various and
learned, of casuistry, of the art of allowing all things; a
progressive literature, in which the indulgence of to-night seems to
become the severity of the morrow.

This casuistry was meant for the world; that mysticism for the
convent. The annihilation of the person and the death of the will form
the great mystic principle. The true moral bearings of that principle
are well shown by Desmarets. "The devout," he says, "having offered up
and annihilated their own selves, exist no longer but in God.
_Thenceforth they can do no wrong._ The better part of them is so
divine that it no longer knows what the other is doing."[91]

[91] An old doctrine which often turns up again in the Middle
Ages. In the seventeenth century it prevails among the
convents of France and Spain. A Norman angel, in the Louviers
business, teaches a nun to despise the body and disregard the
flesh, after the example of Jesus, who bared himself for a
scourging before all the people. He enforces an utter
surrendering of the soul and the will by the example of the
Virgin, "who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived, without
risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit." At
Louviers, David, an old director of some authority, taught
"that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of
becoming innocent again."

It might have been thought that the zealous Joseph who had raised so
loud a cry of alarm against these corrupt teachers, would have gone
yet further; that a grand searching inquiry would have taken place;
that the countless host whose number, in one province only, were
reckoned at sixty thousand, would be found out and closely examined.
But not so: they disappear, and nothing more is known about them. A
few, it is said, were imprisoned; but trial there was none: only a
deep silence. To all appearance Richelieu cared but little about
fathoming the business. In his tenderness for the Capuchins he was not
so blind as to follow their lead in a matter which would have thrown
the supervision of all confessors into their hands.

As a rule, the monks had a jealous dislike of the secular clergy.
Entire masters of the Spanish women, they were too dirty to be
relished by those of France; who preferred going to their own priests
or to some Jesuit confessor, an amphious creature, half monk, half
worldling. If Richelieu had once let loose the pack of Capuchins