ions he could
give absolution. As such, they were eagerly welcomed by the clergy; for
a single magistrate, sitting in secret without appeal, necessarily
grasps at whatever will lighten his burden of responsibility. Nor was
their complexity a stumbling-block. The medieval mind was only too prone
to look on morality as a highly technical art, quite as difficult as
medicine or chancery law--a path where wayfaring men were certain to
err, with no guide but their unsophisticated conscience. What could they
possibly do but cling to their priest with a "blind and unexpressed
faith"?

Against this state of things the Reformation was a violent protest.
Catholicism increasingly took for granted that a man imperilled his soul
by thinking for himself; Protestantism replied that he could certainly
lose it, if he left his thinking to another. For it is to the individual
conscience that God speaks; through the struggles of the individual
conscience He builds up a strong and stable Christian character. "A man
may be a heretic in the truth," says Milton in his _Areopagitica_
(1644), "if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the
Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief
be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. There is not
any burden that some would not gladlier post off to another than the
charge and care of their religion. A wealthy man, addicted to his
pleasures and his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled,
and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill
to keep a stock going upon that trade. What does he therefore but
resolve to give over toiling, and find himself some factor, to whose
care and conduct he may commit the whole managing of his religious
affairs--some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he
adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion with all the locks
and keys into his custody, and indeed makes the very person of that man
his religion. So that a man may say his religion is now no more within
himself, but is become a dividual moveable, which goes or comes near
him, according as that good man frequents the house."

Twelve years after the _Areopagitica_ appeared Pascal's _Provincial
Letters_ (1656-1657). These deal with the casuists of the
Counter-Reformation in the spirit of Milton, laying especial stress on
the artificiality of their methods and the laxity of their results. Not,
of course, that