’Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.’  It is manifest that both the old and the new covenant upon which modern Christianity is supposed to rest, suffered no transactions in matters so clear to the human conscience.  Jesus himself refined upon the legality of the Mosaic code by defining sin as egotism or concupiscence.  But the Company of Jesus took pains in their casuistry to provide attenuating circumstances for every sin in detail.  By their doctrines of the invincible erroneous conscience, of occult compensation, of equivocation, of mental reservation, of probabilism, and of philosophical sin, they afforded loopholes for the gratification of every passion, and for the commission of every crime.  Instead of maintaining that any injury done to a neighbor is wrong, they multiplied instances in which a neighbor may be injured.  Instead of holding firm to Christ’s verdict that sexual vice is implicit in licentious desire, they analyzed the sensual modes of crude voluptuousness, taxed each in turn at arbitrary values, and provided plausible excuses for indulgence.  Instead of laying it down as a broad principle that men must keep their word, they taught them how to lie with spiritual impunity and with credit to their reputation as sons of the Church.  Thus the inventive genius of the casuist, bent on dissecting immorality and reducing it to classes; the interrogative ingenuity of the confessor, pruriently inquisitive into private experience; the apologetic subtlety of the director, eager to supply his penitent with salves and anodynes; were all alike and all together applied to anti-social contamination in matters of lubricity, and to anti-social corruption in matters of dishonesty, fraud, falsehood, illegality and violence.  The single doctrine of probabilism, as Pascal abundantly proved, facilitates the commission of crime; for there is no perverse act which some casuist of note has not plausibly excused.

It may be urged that confession and direction, as adopted by the Catholic Church, bring the abominations of casuistry logically in their train.  Priests who have to absolve sinners must be familiar with sin in all its branches.  In the confessional they will be forced to listen to recitals, the exact bearings of which they cannot understand unless they are previously instructed.  Therefore the writings of Sanchez, Diana, Liguori, Burchard, Billuard, Rousselot, Gordon, Gaisson, are put into their hands at an early age—­works which reveal more secrets of impudicity than Aretino has described, or Commodus can have practiced—­works which recommend more craft and treachery and fraud and falsehood than Machiavelli accorded to his misbegotten Saviour of Society.  In these writings men vowed to celibacy probe the foulest labyrinths of sexual impurity; men claiming to stand outside the civil order and the state, imbibe false theories upon property and probity and public duty.