ted by St. Augustine, emphasised the
efficacy of human effort and belittled the importance of supernatural
grace. The Calvinists emphasised the degradation of man through Original
Sin, and considered mankind so corrupt that the will was of no avail;
and thus fell into the doctrine of predestination. It was upon the
doctrine of grace according to St. Augustine that the Jansenists relied;
and the _Augustinus_ of Jansenius was presented as a sound exposition of
the Augustinian views.

[B] The great man of Port-Royal was of course Saint-Cyran, but any
one who is interested will certainly consult, first of all, the book
of Sainte-Beuve mentioned.

Such heresies are never antiquated, because they forever assume new
forms. For instance, the insistence upon good works and "service" which
is preached from many quarters, or the simple faith that any one who
lives a good and useful life need have no "morbid" anxieties about
salvation, is a form of Pelagianism. On the other hand, one sometimes
hears enounced the view that it will make no real difference if all the
traditional religious sanctions for moral behaviour break down, because
those who are born and bred to be nice people will always prefer to
behave nicely, and those who are not will behave otherwise in any case:
and this is surely a form of predestination--for the hazard of being
born a nice person or not is as uncertain as the gift of grace.

It is likely that Pascal was attracted as much by the fruits of
Jansenism in the life of Port-Royal as by the doctrine itself. This
devout, ascetic, thoroughgoing society, striving heroically in the midst
of a relaxed and easy-going Christianity, was formed to attract a nature
so concentrated, so passionate, and so thoroughgoing as Pascal's. But
the insistence upon the degraded and helpless state of man, in
Jansenism, is something also to which we must be grateful, for to it we
owe the magnificent analysis of human motives and occupations which was
to have constituted the early part of his book. And apart from the
Jansenism which is the work of a not very eminent bishop who wrote a
Latin treatise which is now unread, there is also, so to speak, a
Jansenism of the individual biography. A moment of Jansenism may
naturally take place, and take place rightly, in the individual;
particularly in the life of a man of great and intense intellectual
powers, who cannot avoid seeing through human beings and observing the
vanity