hemselves there
authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of possession
and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from no
other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither,
by breathing its air and by hearing its language, they are
habituated to iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and,
after having long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at
last behold it with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it;
that is to say, without observing what is happening, they make over
their consciences, and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which
they were, by little and little become quite worldly, and not far
from pagan.

What could surpass the adaptedness of such preaching as that to the need
of the moment for which it was prepared? And how did the libertine
French monarch contrive to escape the force of truth like the following,
with which the preacher immediately proceeds?--

You would say, and it really seems, that for the court, there are
other principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and
that the courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience
different in kind and in quality from that of other men; for such
is the prevailing idea of the matter,--an idea well sustained, or
rather unfortunately justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my
dear hearers, St. Paul assures us, that there is but one God and
one faith; and woe to the man who dividing Him, this one God, shall
represent Him as at court less an enemy to human transgressions
than He is outside of the court; or, severing this one faith, shall
suppose it in the case of one class more indulgent than in the case
of another.

Bourdaloue, as Jesuit, could not but feel the power of Pascal in his
"Provincial Letters," constantly undermining the authority of his order.
His preaching, as Sainte-Beuve well says, may be considered to have
been, in the preacher's intention, one prolonged confutation of Pascal's
immortal indictment. We borrow of Sainte-Beuve a short extract from
Bourdaloue's sermon on slander, which may serve as an instance to show
with what adroitness the Jesuit retorted anonymously upon the
Jansenist:--

Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
consecrate sl