THE BRITISH MAGAZINE. JULY 1, 1836. ORIGINAL PAPERS. RISE AND PROGRESS OF JANSENISM. (Concluded from the last Number.) Ir would exceed the limits of the present paper to enter at any length into the biography of the Port Royal saints; my present object being rather to speak of Jansenism as a system, than to view it in its effect upon those who professed it. I cannot, however, forbear from introducing in this place some account of one of these eminent men. M. Le Maitre (not, I believe, the same who was afterwards called Saçi, and also translated the Bible, but a relative,) was the ornament and oracle of the French bar. When he pleaded, (says the historian of the Port Royal,) the other courts of law, and even the lecture rooms, at Paris, were deserted. At the age of twenty-seven he had become a councillor of state, and was in the highest favour at court, as well as in his own profession. His mother, a woman of great piety, dreaded the effect which so much popularity and distinction might produce upon a naturally ambitious mind. When Le Maitre was in his thirtieth year, and at the height of his reputation, it happened that Madame D'Audilly, the intimate friend of his mother, with whom she had taken refuge from the ill-treatment of her husband, became dangerously ill. She was visited by the Abbé de St. Cyran, who conversed with her upon religious subjects, and read by her side the prayers of the church. At some of these interviews Le Maitre was present; and the truths of religion, enforced by so experienced a teacher as St. Cyran, and heightened in their effect by the striking circumstances under which they were presented, were speedily impressed with indelible force upon a mind naturally warm and imaginative. He withdrew from the death bed, and formed, without delay, the resolution of quitting the world, and of dedicating the rest of his life in retirement to God. The historian of the Port Royal has preserved the letter which Le VOL. X.-July, 1836. B Maitre wrote, upon forming this determination, to his father; and I am sure that I shall be excused for giving a translation of it. "You have been (he writes) instrumental, under God, in placing me in the world; and I am too sensible of the respect due to a parent to lose one moment in acquainting you with the resolution which, by God's infinite mercy, I have formed, after three months' reflection, of quitting my profession, and withdrawing into retirement, where I may dedicate the remainder of my days to God. I have abstained, by the advice of my friends, from making known this resolution, until quite satisfied that it was no excitement of the moment, but a direction from above. Time, instead of weakening, has only confirmed the impression; and I am now satisfied that it comes from Him who is alone the master of our hearts, and changes them at his own pleasure. "I quit the world at His bidding, as you would quit it if called by the same voice. I pretend to no special revelation or extraordinary vision. I am simply following the voice which speaks in the gospel, urging me to repent of my sins. I am not exchanging the honours of one profession for those of another; reputation at court, for reputation in the church. I do not desire the notoriety of retiring into a monastery; but I seek some private abode, where ambition can have no place, and wherein I may seek God in repentance and by prayer. "I expect that my resolution will astonish you. Six months ago, I thought no more of such a step than you think of it at present. I came to the determination without the advice of any friend. A voice spoke, not to my ear, but to my heart. "If the example of an eldest son quitting the world in his thirtieth year, with fortune smiling around him, with the favour of kings shining upon him, with the path of honour open to him-if an example such as this could move you, it would be to me a cause of greater joy than that which you felt on hearing of my birth. But this must be God's work. My words are of no avail, and I have ever shrunk from acting the preacher with you (vous savez d'ailleurs que je n'ai jamais fait le prédicateur avec vous.) I will only say, what you doubtless, know better than myself,-that it is no mark of weakness to cultivate the Christian graces. One whom the world has never held weak or scrupulous, and who is still the same as ever, resolves to sacrifice the fair fame of an orator and a courtier, for the simple character of a servant of Christ." This letter presents (I think) a fair specimen of the tone and spirit of Jansenism. Who can fail, upon reading or hearing it, to lament that any should carry out of the world a temper so fitted to amend it? Practical religion had not yet realized its perfect work,--the spirit of the hermit, in the midst of social intercourse and lawful occupation. The spirit of Jansenism is, by many degrees, the best which the church of Rome has exhibited; but the reformed catholic church has come nearer still to the scriptural pattern, according to which activity in business may be combined with fervour of spirit. "We need not bid, for cloistered cell, The trivial round, the common task, Le Maitre retired into a private house, near the Abbey of Port Royal; and having once put his hand to the plough, did not turn back. It seems necessary to my subject that I should touch briefly upon the question of the Port Royal miracles. The first miracle professed to have been wrought in the Port Royal, and that upon which the Jansenists lay the greatest stress, is reported to have taken place in the year 1656, nearly eighty years before the alleged miracles at the tomb of the Abbé Paris. It is thus related by the historians of the Port Royal :-Marguerite Perrier, a child of eleven years old, and a pupil in the Port Royal School, had for more than three years been afflicted with the disorder of the eye called fistula lacrymalis, the effect of which had been to render the cheek bone carious, and to change the appearance not only of the eye, but of the whole face. She is described as having presented so painful and distressing a spectacle, that she was not allowed to appear in public, but was attended by a single nun in her own apartment. The physicians had pronounced her disorder incurable, except through the possible success of an operation. It was just at this time that a storm of persecution was expected to fall upon Port Royal, in consequence of the refusal of its inhabitants to assent to the second papal bull already mentioned, in which the five propositions were declared to be expressed in the sense of the Augustinus. The members of the convent were engaged in continual prayer against the expected calamity. It happened (say the historians of Port Royal) that, in this emergency, a relic was introduced into Port Royal-a thorn of the crown used at the crucifixion. It was applied to the eye of the little Marguerite Perrier, and effected an instantaneous cure. The surgeons who had attended her came forward to attest that her state had been such as to render a cure, except by a long process, physically impossible; the King sent his own physician to inquire into the case, and confessed himself satisfied with the evidence of the miracle; the Jesuits declared that miracles in the church were not uncommon, and that they held it dangerous to deny the reality of one so strongly attested as this; and the persecution was accordingly suspended. We ought, surely, to approach to the examination of this or any other similar question with minds unbiassed by objections on the ground of antecedent improbability. It is not for us to judge of the occasions upon which it may seem fit to Omnipotence to interrupt the ordinary course of nature. Still less are we justified in restricting the promises which he has made to the prayer of the righteous, even in the case of temporal blessings. Far from us be that infidel spirit in which the historian of the age of Louis XIV. demands-“Is it likely that miracles should be wasted to justify a few dozen of devotees in their struggles to uphold the sense of Jansenius ?" " But, on the other hand, we have no right to approach the evidence of such an alleged miracle (as the Jansenists seem to have done) with prepossessions in its favour on the ground of antecedent likelihood. It is certain that the seasonableness of this miracle of the sainte épine, operating as it did to delay a threatened persecution, may reasonably become, in the estimate of an impartial judge, a ground of suspicion. The same circumstances which made the Jansenists think it likely that such a miracle should be wrought, may reasonably make us think it likely that some false friends of their own should have invented the story of it, or that an extraordinary cure should have been exalted into a miracle. I do not find, again, that it was made known, out of the convent, for some days after it was alleged to have happened. The person who first bore witness to it was a nun, who afterwards lost all credit with her companions, and was convicted of having forged the account of several miracles performed (as she said) upon herself. The surgeon of the convent gave evidence in its favour, but he might be an interested witness. The king's surgeon spoke to the fact of the cure, but he had never seen the patient before. And as we find that the original witness of the fact was afterwards branded with infamy in the convent, it is possible that only herself and one or two of her companions were accessary to the invention of the story, which enthusiasm would readily circulate. At a later period, when the same person reported a miracle, the case was diligently investigated in the convent, and the fraud exposed without hesitation. The girl Perrier would seem, without question, to have been ill, and to have recovered; but she may have recovered (for aught which appears) by degrees. Voltaire treats the story of the miracle with contempt, yet seems to acknowledge the fact of the cure; and we cannot otherwise account for Pascal (who was Marguerite Perrier's uncle) having believed in the miracle. This fact is in itself sufficient to make us pause before we hastily set it aside; for one would much rather believe the miracle than suppose Pascal and the other holy men of the Port Royal in a conspiracy to propagate a pious fraud. It is on this account that I have been at some pains to examine the story, and I have given my own impression of it. If any one is curious to look into the matter for himself, he will find the account in the notes (by Nicole, under the name of Wendrock) to Pascal's Lettres Provinciales; and in Clemençet's History of Port Royal, in ten volumes, duodecimo; the substance of which, including an account of this miracle, translated into English, is given by Mrs. Schimmelpennenck in her Memoirs of Port Royal. In whatever way we may explain this alleged miracle, it is plain that it is not explicable (like those of the tomb of the Abbé Paris, to which Paley has referred,) by the effects of imagination; the youth of the child, and the nature of the cure wrought upon her, entirely precluding any such supposition. It seems to me that the feelings with which we should approach the consideration of these alleged sanaral miracles are those of a jealous regard for the overwhelming evidence by which the scriptural miracles are supported; unbiassed, however, by à priori objections to the miracles of a later age, especially when believed by men like Pascal. Enthusiasm is possible; but systematic imposture, to any great extent, hardly so. It is allowed by friends and opponents that the conduct of the Jansenists was as unexceptionable, and their religion as free from insincerity, as their moral system was pure and uncompromising. Those detestable principles of the Jesuits, whereby they maintained that the end might justify the means, and that probable opinions (that is, opinions for which anything in the shape of plausible authority could be urged,) are legitimate grounds of conduct, the Jansenists utterly repudiated and abhorred. They maintained (what was a matter of fact), that, according to the Jesuitical system, a licence might be obtained for every sin, however monstrous. We may certainly hope, for the credit of the church, that the opinions attributed by Pascal to Escobar, and some of the leading Jesuits, were not held, at least to the same extent, by the whole society. And yet we can hardly help regarding the society as responsible for opinions which there is no evidence of its having renounced; and it certainly reflects discredit on the church that it should suffer such appalling views of morality to pass current, while it so strongly condemned the comparatively speculative errors of the five propositions. It is, however, sufficiently evident that, both at Rome and at Paris, it was the Jesuits who swayed the councils of the great, and that their hostility was directed rather against spiritual religion in general than against protestantism. It was the same hand which revoked the edict of Nantez and abrogated the peace of Clement IX. There can be no doubt that the Reformation both caused Jansenism, and ruined it. If not to the direct influence of the reformed opinions, yet certainly to their indirect consequences, in giving a stimulus to Jesuitism, the origin and progress of Jansenism must be mainly ascribed. It is probable that the Reformation contributed to it in both ways,-in giving an impulse to inquiry in general, within as well as without the church, no less than in provoking a reaction from the Semi-Pelagianism of the Jesuits. The Jansenists were reformers within the church,—with penetration to see her faults, and fairness to own them, but without decision enough to break their fetters. Again, the Reformation was afterwards no less the indirect cause of ruining Jansenism as a system than it had before been instrumental in raising it up. It gave the church what I may call an over sensitiveness to heresy, especially in the case of opinions at all approximating to those of the reformers. Anti-Pelagian views were regarded, not as Augustinian, but as Calvinistical. It is a grievous proof of the degeneracy of the church to find that, since the days of Augustin, the orthodox and the heretical sides had changed places; the tendency of the church was now to Pelagianism. Had Jansenism appeared a century earlier, the Reformation might never have taken place. Doubtless, much of its necessity would have been superseded had Jansenism been left to work its way, and purify the church within. But it may have been that the truth could only be elicited by some more violent convulsion, the effect of which should be to plunge things in a contrary extreme before they settled in a mean. Doubtless, if Jansenism did not go far enough towards reforming popery, the Reformation at first went much too far. The Calvinists took only half of St. Augustin's doctrine for their standard, instead of the whole, as the Jansenists had done. And yet, for who live under a church which takes the middle way, the right course is rather to feel gratitude for what has been done than to inquire (a speculation for which we are quite unequal) how it could have been done better. us, I find the Jansenist writers, and especially Pascal, resisting, with great earnestness, the charge of heresy. If the Jansenists be heretical, |