incest, nor rapine, nor fraud, nor treason, which cannot be masked as meritorious beneath the mantle of their dispensation’ (ibid. p. 330).  ’I apprehend the difficulty of attacking their teachings; seeing that they merge their own interests with those of the Papacy; and that not only in the article of Pontifical authority, but in all points.  At present they stand for themselves upon the ground of equivocations.  But believe me, they will adjust this also, and that speedily; forasmuch as they are omnipotent in the Roman Court, and the Pope himself fears them’ (ibid. p. 333).  ’Had S. Peter known the creed of the Jesuits, he could have found a way to deny our Lord without sinning’ (ibid. p. 353).  ’The Roman Court will never condemn Jesuit doctrine; for this is the secret of its empire—­a secret of the highest and most capital importance, whereby those who openly refuse to worship it are excommunicated, and those who would do so if they dared, are held in check’ (ibid. p. 105).  The object of this lengthy note is to vindicate for Sarpi a prominent and early place among those candid analysts of Jesuitry who now are lost in the great light of Pascal’s genius.  Sarpi’s Familiar Letters have for my mind even more weight than the famous Lettres Provinciales of Pascal.  They were written with no polemical or literary bias, at a period when Jesuitry was in its prime; and their force as evidence is strengthened by their obvious spontaneity.  A book of some utility was published in 1703 at Salzburg (?), under the title of Artes Jesuiticae Christianus Aletophilus.  This contains a compendium of those passages in casuistical writings on which Pascal based his brilliant satires.  Paul Bert’s modern work, La Morale des Jesuites (Paris:  Charpentier, 1881), is intended to prove that recent casuistical treatises of the school repeat those ancient perversions of sound morals.]

The working of the Company, as we have seen, depended upon a skillful manipulation of apparently hard-and-fast principles.  The Declarations explained away the Constitutions; and an infinite number of minute exceptions and distinctions volatilized vows and obligations into ether.  Transferring the same method to the sphere of ethics, they so wrought upon the precepts of the moral law, whether expressed in holy writ, in the ecclesiastical decrees, or in civil jurisprudence, as to deprive them of their binding force.  The subtlest elasticity had been gained for the machinery of the order by casuistical interpretation.  A like elasticity was secured for the control and government of souls by an identical process.  It was no wonder that the Jesuits became rapidly fashionable as confessors.  The plainest prohibitions were as wax in their hands.  The Decalogue laid down as rules for conduct:  ’Thou shalt not steal;’ ‘Thou shalt not kill;’ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’  Christ spiritualized these rules into their essence:  ’Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;’