the attorney. Pascal notes too the "impious buffooneries" of his
opponents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to promote
geniality of temper in the debate. But of such failures--failures of
taste, of respect towards one's [65] own point of view--the world is
ever unamiably aware; and in the "Letters" there is much to move the
self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal describes his
experiences, while he went from one authority to another to find out
what was really meant by the distinction between grace "sufficient,"
grace "efficacious," grace "active," grace "victorious." He heard, for
instance, that all men have sufficient grace to do God's will; but it
is not always prochain, not always at hand, at the moment of temptation
to do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal's charges are those which may
seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness
of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what
are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which
terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with
which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange
vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.

Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and
Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright
with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh--well,
at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know their own
business. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are serious, and
disinterested, because sincerely interested, in these great
questionings. Jalousie de metier, the reader may suspect, has
something to do with [66] the Professional leaders on both sides of the
controversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then, it was
against the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal's charges came home in full
force. And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of
the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-respect, sins
against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignified
faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere in
great matters--faults promoted in the direction of the consciences of
women and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be
saved in some easy way quite other than Pascal's high, fine, chivalrous
way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what one thinks with the