[Footnote 26: I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of the _Letters_ (1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.]
[Footnote 27: I have in earlier chapters quoted Father Jouvency's volume of the _Historia Societatis_. This volume, recalling and praising the action of the French Jesuits in the time of Henry III. and Henry IV., was published in 1713, and gave such offence that the Parlement suppressed it.]
In the Iberian Peninsula we have the same romantic story of the Jesuits being cast down from a splendid prosperity and expelled with every token of ignominy from countries in which they had almost attained a spiritual dictatorship. Here again, moreover, our chronicle will deal almost exclusively with the actions of a junta of court-Jesuits who bring the calamity upon their Society. It would not be unnatural to suspect that in this there is some partiality; that I ignore the saintly or learned or philanthropic achievements of the majority and bring into prominence only the court-intrigues and abuses of power of a few. But a glance at the works of apologetic writers will show that the candid historian has no alternative. Considering the number and resources of the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their record is singularly barren of great and good deeds. A few examples of shining devotion, which we will notice as we proceed, and a few small scandals, which we will generally ignore, do little to vary the undistinguished monotony of the general life. The majority of the Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits merely continue the work of teaching, preaching, and writing works of theology, in comfortable and unascetic homes, which we have previously described. Our story, like the general history of Spain and Portugal at the time, is mainly concerned with courtiers and politicians.
