them on the path of virtue at your pleasure.  You must certainly tell them then that indulgence in sensuality, falsehood, fraud, violence, covetousness, and tyrannical oppression, is unconditionally wrong.  Make no show of compromise with evil in the gross; but refine away the evil by distinctions, reservations, hypothetical conditions, until it disappears.  Explain how hard it is to know whether a sin be venial or mortal, and how many chances there are against its being in any strict sense a sin at all.  Do not leave folk to their own blunt sense of right and wrong, but let them admire the finer edge of your scalpel, while you shred up evil into morsels they can hardly see.  A ready way may thus be opened for the satisfaction of every human desire without falling into theological faults.  The advantages are manifest.  You will be able to absolve with a clear conscience.  Your penitent will abound in gratitude and open out his heart to you.  You will fulfill your function as confessor and counselor.  He will be secured for the sacred ends of our Society, and will contribute to the greater glory of God.—­It was thus that the Jesuit labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings, turnings, secret chambers, whispering galleries, blind alleys, issues of evasion, came into existence; the whole vicious and monstrous edifice being crowned with the saving virtue of obedience, and the theory of ends justifying means.  After the irony of Pascal, the condensed rage of La Chalotais, and the grave verdict of the Parlement of Paris (1762), it is not necessary now to refute the errors or to expose the abominations of this casuistry in detail.[174] Yet it cannot be wholly passed in silence here; for its application materially favored the influence of Jesuits in modern Europe.

[Footnote 174:  Having mentioned the names of these illustrious Frenchmen, I feel bound to point out how accurately their criticism of the Jesuits was anticipated by Paolo Sarpi.  His correspondence between the years 1608 and 1622 demonstrates that this body of social corrupters had been early recognized by him in their true light.  Sarpi calls them ‘sottilissimi maestri in mal fare,’ ’donde esce ogni falsita et bestemmia,’ ‘il vero morbo Gallico,’ ‘peste pubblica,’ ‘peste del mondo’ (Letters, vol. i. pp. 142, 183, 245, ii. 82, 109).  He says that they ‘hanno messo l’ultima mano a stabilire una corruzione universale’ (ib. vol. i. p. 304).  By their equivocations and mental reservations ’fanno essi prova di gabbare Iddio’ (ib. vol. ii. p. 82).  ’La menzogna non iscusano soltanto ma lodano’ (ib. vol. ii. p. 106).  So far, the utterances which I have quoted might pass for the rhetoric of mere spite.  But the portrait gradually becomes more definite in details limned from life.  ’The Jesuits have so many loopholes for escape, pretexts, colors of insinuation, that they are more changeful than the Sophist of Plato; and when one thinks to have caught them between thumb and finger, they wriggle