d deeper their investigations into
psychological analysis. With this social tendency to dissect the human
heart and to seize its most secret movements, was combined the
religious and, as we may put it, protestant fashion of the hour, in
the spirit of Port Royal. To be a moralist was almost in itself to be
a Jansenist, and we see the author of the "Maximes" presently claiming
to be, after a fashion, evangelical.

There is so little said about theology, in the direct sense, in the
writings of La Rochefoucauld, that his various French critics have
given perhaps too little thought to his religious tendencies. They
have treated him as though he were the enemy of a pious life. But if
we examine that contention from the standpoint provided for us by our
own Puritan habit of thought, we must recognize that there was
something positively pious about the bitter philosopher of the
"Maximes." He was trying, let us never forget, to discover a
scientific form of morals, and hardly enough attention has been given
to the prominence which he gave to a searching analysis of conscience.
He found little to help him in the court religion of the age, but he
was immensely impressed with the Jansenist conception of the frailty
and worthlessness of the natural man. Hence, his persistency in
cultivating almost exclusively the society of those men and women of
Port Royal with whom we might suppose that he had very little in
common. But, quite recently, a discovery has been made, which is not
only of special interest to us as Englishmen, but which throws a
further light on the evangelical or puritan tendency of the author of
the "Maximes."

A careful scholar, M. Ernest Jouy, was led by a passage in a
seventeenth-century MS. to make investigations which seem to have
proved that La Rochefoucauld was acquainted with an English book of
edification and even that he deigned to make use of it in the
fashioning of his famous "Maximes." This was "The Mystery of
Self-Deceiving," published in 1615 by a semi-nonconformist Puritan
divine, Daniel Dyke, minister of Coggeshall in Essex, and translated
obscurely into French by a certain Vernulius. Of the original work
Fuller wrote, "It is a book which will be owned for a truth while men
have any badness in them, and will be owned as a treasure whilst they
have any goodness in them." It is, certainly, an amazing thing to find
that this clumsy old treatise of English divinity was apparently
possessed as a treasur