Holy Spirit; the works of the Fathers (excellent as they were) only by the reflex ray emanating therefrom." . . . . "The Fathers read the Scriptures alone, and we likewise should find ALL there, if we in truth searched them as we ought. Every word in Scripture deserves to be weighed more attentively than pieces of gold." "God has various ways of drawing souls to Himself," he wrote to a friend, "yet I think you have cause to be particularly thankful that your heart, when it was first touched, was awakened by the Words of Christ himself in the Gospel. For surely no means of conversion can be more apostolic than the Word of God. This is the great means of conversion which God himself has appointed. By the sole distribution and dispersion of the Scriptures it is that God has converted, and still does convert, both Jews and Pagans. The Scriptures are the grand instrument by which God originally founded his church, and by which He still continually reforms, maintains, and augments it.”*

To the Jesuits who would compel the nuns of Port Royal to sign the formulary (which we shall refer to hereafter), against their consciences, one of them replied:

All conscience is founded upon the Word of God, who is without variation or shadow of turning, and whose Word is immutable and cannot be broken. When the conscience is once formed, it cannot, therefore, be re-formed. Conscience must be solidly grounded, formed upon the rock of the Word of God, and not be continually re-formed on the shifting sands of the versatile notions of men:

And this was said with reference to a papal injunction to sign the formulary.

Among the one-hundred-and-one propositions condemned by the Pope, in the New Testament of Quesnel, who was at one time Director of Port Royal, are the following:

The study of the Scriptures is proper for all. To take away the New Testament from Christians, or to withhold from them the means of understanding it, is to shut up the mouth of Christ. To oppose the study of the Scriptures, especially of the Gospels, is to withdraw from the children the use of light, and place the Scriptures themselves under excommuni

cation.

In conjunction with the Port Royalists, the Bishop of Alét, in the South of France, a man of kindred spirit, labored to extend the reading of the Scriptures among the people. He strongly urged De Saci and others to undertake a new translation for general use, and he inculcated upon the students in his theological seminary the diligent study of the Bible. As the result of these efforts, a great number of copies were sold or distributed gratis by the private Bible Societies which were established; and even, for a time, the

• Memoirs of Port Royal.

French government and many of the bishops engaged in this good work, while yet Jesuit influence had not gained complete ascendency-an influence always opposed to the circu lation of the Scriptures. In many cases, however, the French bishops appear to have been driven to a show of zeal by the efforts of the Protestants.

Knowing the veneration of the Jansenists for the Word of God, we are not surprised to find them zealous advocates of the doctrine of justification by faith in the sacrifice and merits of Jesus Christ. This doctrine of Christ and his Apostles, taught also by Augustine, and afterward by his disciple, Jansenius, was acknowledged by his followers even in the face of bitter persecution:

"The true use of the written Word," wrote De Saci, "is to lead us to the living Word, which can alone invigorate and cure our souls, just as the steady contemplation of the brazen serpent could alone cure the wounds inflicted by the fiery serpents." "The more we attach ourselves with singleness of eye to contemplate Christ upon the cross, and his wounds, which are the cure of ours, the more benefit shall we receive from that divine power which flows from Him to us, in order to bring us back to Him who is alone our strength and our rest. The sufferings of Christ are all our merits and plea; they are the source of all the mercies and grace we receive; it is by them only that we become living members of Christ Jesus. The Cross of Christ is an abundant and superabundant source of mercy; the Cross of Christ alone it is which sanctifies not only the blessed Virgin and St. John, but also the penitent thief and Mary Magdalen. The one no longer considered that he was a robber, nor the other that she was a sinner. They only considered those fountains of blood which poured from the body of Jesus Christ, as fully sufficient to drown, as in a holy deluge, the sins of the whole world. There they looked, and looking, found their cure.

"We indeed are, by the natural creation of Adam, nothing but sin, ingratitude, and pride; and we see nothing in ourselves but subjects of guilt, condemnation, and remorse. But that faith, by a vital reception of which we are Christians, after showing us this ground of corruption and sin, which ought profoundly to humble us, shows us with it the infinite mercy of God, founded upon the blood of Jesus Christ, as mediator and reconciler of men with God. We must then unite these two views, which ought never to be separated-the view of ourselves and our sins, and the view of Jesus Christ and of his merits. The first terrifies, the second reassures. The first deeply humbles, the second elevates, with what St. Augustine terms a holy presumption-the fruit not of pride, but of faith-and this confidence is firm, because it is humble. It is founded on the entire annihilation of hope from man; but on the mercy of God, and the efficacy of the blood of Christ-both of which are infinite.

"As for myself I feel that I am poor interiorly; that I am destitute of every good thing; but O, my Gop, thou hast undertaken to cure me. God alone can be the physician of the soul. The blood of God alone can be our remedy; the Spirit of God alone can achieve our cure."*

De Saci's Letters, vol. ii., pp. 677, 678.

What Christian heart can fail to respond to the following sentiments, so decidedly evangelical (excepting, of course, the allusion to transubstantiation), of one of the Port Royalist nuns, Madame de Valois, while undergoing cruel sufferings for her fidelity to the truth, and deprived of the sacra ments of the church?

If I cannot have fellowship with my sisters, in partaking of thy most sacred body, and most precious blood, enable me, O Lord, to have fellowship and communion with thee, in thy sufferings; thy sufferings which are the whole of our merits, and which form our sole plea of mercy before the throne of God. By them alone it is that we are redeemed from death, and become living members of Jesus Christ; and by faith in them, by an intimate union with this divine Head, it is, that we become one body with Him; through Him alone it is, that God is willing to accept our bodies as a living sacrifice. There is but one sacrifice for sin; even the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, which sacrifice was regarded by the eye of faith by all the saints of old times. I not only hope, but I trust, with full assurance, to obtain the pardon of all my sins, by offering by faith Jesus Christ, the alone true victim for the expiation of all sin.*

What more evangelical sentiment could be uttered than fell from the lips of the dying Angelique, abbess of Port Royal? "The mercy of God! All is included in that word. mercy! Jesus! Jesus! thou art my God, my strength, my justification !"

Upon the subject of special, efficacious grace, the Jansenists. did not differ materially from Calvin and the Reformers generally, as indeed they could not as followers of Augus tine, between whom and Calvin there is an essential correspondence. And yet, for fear of being branded as heretics and Calvinists, a charge which the Jesuits were ever ready to bring against them, they tried to make out a difference upon this point between Port Royal and Geneva. Pascal attempted this in his eighteenth 'Provincial Letter,' but with little success; his vindication of the Jansenists from the "heresy" of Calvinism being based for the most part upon a misunderstanding, or misrepresentation, unintentional of course, of the French Reformer. Wherein, for instance, does the following fine passage from Pascal differ from the Reformed doctrine :

They [the Jansenists] know too well that man, of his own nature, has always the power of sinning, and of resisting grace; and that, since

* Memoirs of Port Royal, vol. ii., pp 108, 109, 110.

he became corrupt, he unhappily carries in his breast a fountain of concupiscence, which infinitely augments that power; but, that notwithstanding this, when it pleases God to visit him with his mercy, he makes the soul to do what he wills, and in the manner he wills it to be done, while, at the same time, the infallibility of the divine operation does not in any way destroy the natural liberty of man, in consequence of the secret and wonderful ways by which God operates this change. This has been most wonderfully explained by St. Augustine, in such a way as to dissipate all those imaginary inconsistencies which the opponents of efficacious grace suppose to exist between the sovereign power of grace over the free will and the power which the free will has to resist grace. For, according to that great saint, whom the popes and the church have held to be a standard authority on this subject, God transforms the heart of man, by shedding abroad in it a heavenly sweetness, which, surmounting the delights of the flesh, and inducing him to feel, on the one hand, his own mortality and nothingness, and to discover, on the other hand, the majesty and eternity of God, makes him conceive a distaste for the pleasures of sin, which interpose between him and incorruptible happiness. Finding his chiefest joy in the God who charms him, his soul is drawn towards him infallibly, but of its own accord, by a motion perfectly free, spontaneous, love-impelled; so that it would be its torment and punishment to be separated from him. Not but that the person has always the power of forsaking his God, and that he may not actually forsake him, provided he choose to do it. But how could he choose such a course, seeing that the will always inclines to that which is most agreeable to it, and that in the case we now suppose nothing can be more agreeable than the possession of that one good, which comprises in itself all other good things. Quod enim (says St. Augustine) amplius nos de'eciat, secundum operemur necesse est-Our actions are necessarily deter mined by that which affords us the greatest pleasure.' Such is the manner in which God regulates the free will of man without encroaching on its freedom, and in which the free will, which always may, but never will, resist his grace, turns to God with a movement as voluntary as it is irresistible, whensoever he is pleased to draw it to himself by the sweet constraint of his efficacious inspirations.*

We are reminded of a similar passage in Luther: a comment upon John, vi. 44:

This drawing [of the Father] is not such as the hangman employs when he carries a thief up the ladder and to the gallows; but it is a kind attraction and drawing towards himself, as sometimes a good-hearted man draws the people towards him by a friendly and accommodating demeanor. Thus also does God allure men and bring them mildly near himself, so that they remain with him willingly and joyfully.

Who can doubt that Pascal and Calvin and Luther are now rejoicing together over that sovereign efficacious grace which sweetly drew them to the Father, however widely separated they seemed, or thought themselves to be, on earth? And must there not have been a broad difference between Port Royal and Rome, when such propositions as

The Provincial Letters, xviii. M'Crie's Transl.

the following from the Jansenist, Quesnel, were condemned as heretical by the pope?

When God does not soften the heart by the unction of his grace, exhortations and external graces serve only to harden it the more. When God accompanies his command and his external word with the unction of his Spirit, and the internal power of his grace, it then works in the heart that obedience which it requires. The grace of Christ is the efficient source of all good actions, and is absolutely necessary to the performance of every good deed. Without grace, we can love nothing, except to our ruin.

And, as may be inferred from these, their views of grace, the Jansenists labored earnestly to introduce a spiritual in place of a sacramental religion, or of a reliance on rites and forms, on the outward operations of the priesthood, or anything short of the merits and grace of Jesus Christ, and the inward work of the Holy Spirit to enlighten, convert, and sanctify. They sent men to the Word of God, to the closet, to Christ. They taught that "deep sorrow for sin, arising from a genuine love to God, was indispensably necessary to a truly evangelical repentance," thus opposing the Jesuit doctrine that the love of God in repentance is superfluous. And yet with strange inconsistency they held (in common, however, with Augustine and many great Protestant names), the monstrous dogma of baptismal regeneration. Indeed, in tracing the history of Jansenism, we are perpetually stumbling upon such inconsistencies.

This fact is strikingly brought out in the following extract from the Thoughts' of Pascal, in which his Scriptural views of spiritual religion are seen in unnatural union with the unscriptural practices of his church; and it is interesting and yet painful to mark the struggles of his Christloving heart to reconcile the two:

In the infancy of the Christian Church, we see no Christians but those who were thoroughly instructed in all matters necessary to salvation; but in these days we see on every side an ignorance so gross that it agonizes all those who have a tender regard for the interests of the Church. Formerly, it was necessary to come out from the world, in order to be received into the Church; whilst in these days, we enter the Church almost at the same time that we enter the world. Hence it arises, that whilst then Christians were all well instructed, now there are many in a fearful state of ignorance; then, those who had been initiated into Christianity by baptism, and who had renounced the vices of the world, to embrace the piety of the Church, rarely declined again to the world which they had left; whilst now we commonly see the vices of the world in the hearts