This brought him to open at random the book of the Holy Scriptures which he had before him, and to read what came before his eyes:  and these were words which finally induced him to give up Manichaeism.  The good Steno, a Dane, who was titular Bishop of Titianopolis, Vicar Apostolic (as they say) of Hanover and the region around, when there was a Duke Regent of his religion, told us that something of that kind had happened to him.  He was a great anatomist and deeply versed in natural science; but he unfortunately gave up research therein, and from being a great physicist he became a mediocre theologian.  He would almost listen to nothing more about the marvels of Nature, and an express order from the Pope in virtute sanctae obedientiae was needed to extract from him the observations M. Thevenot asked of him.  He told us then that what had greatly helped towards inducing him to place himself on the side of the Roman Church had been the voice of a lady in Florence, who had cried out to him from a window:  ’Go not on[179] the side where you are about to go, sir, go on the other side.’  ’That voice struck me,’ he told us, ‘because I was just meditating upon religion.’  This lady knew that he was seeking a man in the house where she was, and, when she saw him making his way to the other house, wished to point out where his friend’s room was.

101.  Father John Davidius, the Jesuit, wrote a book entitled Veridicus Christianus, which is like a kind of Bibliomancy, where one takes passages at random, after the pattern of the Tolle, lege of St. Augustine, and it is like a devotional game.  But the chances to which, in spite of ourselves, we are subject, play only too large a part in what brings salvation to men, or removes it from them.  Let us imagine twin Polish children, the one taken by the Tartars, sold to the Turks, brought to apostasy, plunged in impiety, dying in despair; the other saved by some chance, falling then into good hands to be educated properly, permeated by the soundest truths of religion, exercised in the virtues that it commends to us, dying with all the feelings of a good Christian.  One will lament the misfortune of the former, prevented perhaps by a slight circumstance from being saved like his brother, and one will marvel that this slight chance should have decided his fate for eternity.

102.  Someone will perchance say that God foresaw by mediate knowledge that the former would have been wicked and damned even if he had remained in Poland.  There are perhaps conjunctures wherein something of the kind takes place.  But will it therefore be said that this is a general rule, and that not one of those who were damned amongst the pagans would have been saved if he had been amongst Christians?  Would that not be to contradict our Lord, who said that Tyre and Sidon would have profited better by his preaching, if they had had the good fortune to hear it, than Capernaum?