Jesuits form one of the most telling indictments ever written to expose hypocrisy. They strike and they flash. Simple words are joined in brief sentences strong in their eloquence, carrying conviction by their rigid sequence of argument. No irony could excel the irony with which he demonstrates how different Jesuit casuists indicate how little and how seldom it is necessary for the Christian to love God, or teach the advantage of having two confessors, one for mortal sins and one for venial sins, or find reasons for justifying homicide. The book is a masterpiece of French prose because of the deep earnestness of the author and the quick light touch with which he handles the gravest of subjects. Pascal died after much physical suffering in 1662. Eight years afterwards appeared a volume of his Pensées, incoherent fragments collected and arranged by his friends. Fragmentary though the collection is, it remains of great value. It is a battle against scepticism, a battle brilliantly conducted by one who sees the difference between reason and religion, and refuses to relinquish either. Pascal looks out upon mankind, and he puts side by side the two extreme views of human life which exist outside the limits of Christianity. There is the view held by those who, like Epictetus, think of man's greatness, his moral strength, his mastery over those ideas and appearances which present themselves from without, his fellowship with God. And there is the view of those who, like Montaigne, are concerned with the comedy of life, the vanity of man's business and pleasure and opinions, who select and catalogue our failures. Pascal discerns the right and the wrong in both these views. He sees man's capacity for greatness. The weakness of human nature caused Montaigne to smile and to doubt. It caused Pascal to grieve and to seek. He wishes to ignore nothing, whether it makes for or against religion. He faces the anomalies and the perplexities of life and all the multitude of human errors, and beyond them all he sees God and certainty. It is a God who says 'Thou wouldst not search for me, if thou hadst not already found me'. And man's greatness is fallen greatness, greatness disinherited. The disaster of the Fall is a fundamental supposition of Christianity, and it gives us a key to the anomalies of our present condition. He is careful to tell us that revelation does not banish all our difficulties; but he has an overwhelming conviction of its truth, because of the profound correspondence of Christianity with what he knows of himself and of the whole complex nature of man. The great preachers of France had much in common with Pascal. They, too, were fine analysts of the soul. They were haunted by the necessity of bringing a moral revival into the midst of a society corrupted by idleness, by a paganized literature and a lascivious monarch. In exposing the depravity and the atheism of their contemporaries they knew the value of a definite creed. And when they saw the fluctuations of infidel philosophy and the variations of Protestantism', they thanked God that they could point their hearers to an infallible rule of faith, the same in all times and in all places. And yet that rule of faith was changing, though they knew it not. At the outbreak of the Reformation on the Continent, the two contending parties, Roman Catholic and Protestant, were not fully conscious of their differences. Their disputes turned upon the mode whereby fallen man can be justified by grace and gain peace with God. But from that centre the opposition spread backward and forward with astonishing rapidity, touching the whole course of human conduct, and reaching the two terms of human history, man's creation and fall and his entrance into eternity. And as we look back upon five generations of the resistance offered to Protestantism by the Counter-Reformation, we can detect a steady evolution in the development of that resistance. It was not uniform. There existed within the Roman Catholic communion grave divergences of opinion and practice. Quite apart from the Jansenists with their sincere if one-sided devotion to St. Augustine, we find a school, of which Bossuet is the great representative, always turning to the Bible and the Fathers for the purest sources of Christianity. And on the other hand there is the party of the Ultramontanes and later Jesuits, who rather than leave open any door of reconciliation with the Protestants, lay new burdens upon the conscience of their own co-religionists. They oppose the Lutheran doctrine that the corruption of our nature is 'intima, pessima, profundissima' by an attitude towards worldliness and sin which inclines to easygoing optimism. To Protestant individualism and anarchy they are ready to oppose an infallible Pope; to the blind rejection of tradition they oppose unhistorical legend, and to the neglect of the communion of saints they oppose an ever-increasing worship of God's servants that finally culminated in such prayers as 'Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I give you my heart and soul', where the same words are addressed to the Creator and the creature. And it was the latter school, and not the school of Bossuet, that eventually proved victorious. Reflexion upon the distinctive doctrines of Lutheranism and Ultramontanism, doctrines which, however harmful they may be, never extinguished the light of the Gospel, will, I think, suggest to us that there was room and there was need for another path of Christian life and thought, a middle path between those two extremes. The leaders of Gallicanism strove to find and to keep that path. If they failed, they did not fail ingloriously. They represented within the Roman Catholic communion a grave and inward religion, reasonable and manly, which preferred sense to sensibility, and thoughtfulness to the lures of imagination, active in good works and watchful against every appearance of evil, loyally attached to the Church, and devoted to the incarnate Word who is 'full of grace and truth'. As we have already seen, a different party was not only in existence but was striving for the mastery. It would tolerate no enthusiasm but the enthusiasm of exaggeration and excess. It has gradually rendered more difficult and more impossible within the Roman communion that moderation which Ultramontanes regard as a kind of contraband heresy, a moderation which is both more Catholic and more apostolic than the two extremes which it has endeavoured to avoid. Pure Catholicism and undefiled, like perfect holiness, is for none of us a present possession but an ideal. And the path where that ideal can be approached most worthily will be a mean in relation to some other paths, but in itself it will be the best and the most heroic. II RELIGION IN GREAT BRITAIN FROM 1550 TO 1689 Ps xvi. 7: The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground: yea, I have a goodly heritage. THE heart of mediaeval English religion was not superstition. It was devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ and His Passion. But it was enfeebled by superstition, and in England as in Italy it was right to purge that superstition. A reformation was necessary, and in the year 1550 the English Reformation, as a Reformation and considered apart from the royal adulteries, murders, and thefts by which it was unhappily accompanied, was essentially complete. In no other country was the work done equally well. Nowhere else had the ancient and the modern spirit been so wisely combined. The claims of the Pope to govern and to tax the dioceses of other bishops had been repudiated. An official translation of the Bible had been issued. A good statement of doctrine, called the Erudition for any Christian Man, a book now too much neglected, had been published with the full authority of the Church. The standard of private prayer was a Primer based on mediaeval books. The new Book of Common Prayer contained the order of the Mass and other public services of the Church carefully simplified and excellently translated.1 And lastly there was the new Ordinal. It asserted that the orders of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons had been in the Church 'from the Apostles' time' and that these orders are to be 'continued'. While preserving the apostolic succession of the ministry Cranmer severely reduced the clumsy accumulation of old 1 |