for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them,
because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur
source. What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable! And
the "Letters" abound in such things.

But to his comparison of Pascal with Moliere, Voltaire added that
Bossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que les dernieres. And in truth the
more serious note of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips
have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness came to be like
some incurable malady, a visitation of God, as people used to say, is
presently struck when, in the natural course of his argument, his
thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms between one man or
one class of men and another, deep down to those awful encounters of
the individual soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal
problem of predestination.

In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits had presented a
view of the conflict of good and evil in the soul, which is honourable
to God and encouraging to man, and which has catholicity on its face.
All to whom entrance into the Church, through its formal ministries,
[69] lies open are truly called of God, while beyond it stretches the
ocean of "His uncovenanted mercies." That is a doctrine for the many,
for those whose position in the religious life is mediocrity, who so
far as themselves or others can discern have nothing about them of
eternal or necessary or irresistible reprobation, or of the eternal
condition opposite to that.

The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other hand, of [ ]+ but
irresistible grace was the appropriate view of the Port-Royalists,
high-pitched, eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal
himself, however much in his turn he might refine upon it. Whether or
not, as a matter of fact, upon which, as distinct from matters of
faith, an infallible pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch bishop
Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port-Royalists had found in
his "Augustinus" an incentive to devotion, and were avowedly his
adherents. In that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed, that
fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the Roman Catholic Church,
maintaining, emphasising in it a view, a tradition, really constant in
it from St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a merit of Pascal,
his literary merit, to have given a very fine-toned expression to that
doctrine, though mainly in the wa