Excerpt from Essays by a Barrister: Reprinted From the Saturday It follows from this that Pascal's attack upon the Jesuits must either go a great deal further than its author intended it to go, or must be considered to apply at least as strongly to the Jansenists as to their opponents. Pascal was the partisan of a system of morality of the most rigid kind; and it is singular that it should not have been more frequently oh served, that in the Provincial Letters he continually lays himself open to retorts as to his own views, which it would have been very difficult to parry; and it may be added, that if, upon such a subject, any weight at all is to be attached to facts and history, it is not less difficult to justify his views of morality than to justify those which he attacked. In fact, the Jesuits' views have some advantages over his. Whatever were their faults, they seem to have felt that a system of morality which absolutely con demus the whole existing state of society, and which would, if adopted, bind in iron chains all the energies and all the affections of mankind, stands self - refuted. In their anxiety to bring human life within the pale of salvation, the Jesuits may have stretched their system further than they had any right to stretch it; but if it is once granted (and at that time it was universally admitted) that morality is capable of being reduced to a system at all, the wish that there may be some sort of proportionbetween that system and the actual state of human society is one to which it is impossible to refuse a considerable degree of sympathy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.