What progress is here made in a few years, since the "Provincial Letters!" What has become of the casuists? Those simple people who took and effaced transgressions one by one, giving themselves immense trouble. They are all scattered to the winds.
Casuistry was an art that had its masters, doctors, and cunning men. But now, what need of doctors? Every _spiritual_ man, every devout person, every Jesuit in a short robe can speak as well as he in the long one the soft language of pious tenderness. The Jesuits have fallen, but _Jesuitism_ has gained ground. It is no longer requisite to direct the _attention_ every day, for every distinct case, by special equivocations. Love that mingles and confounds everything is the sovereign, most gentle, and powerful equivocation. Lull the _will_ to sleep and there is no longer any intention, "The soul, losing its nonentity in its infinity," will be gently annihilated in the bosom of love.
[1] By two cardinals and librarians of the Vatican, Bellarmin and Baronius, one of whom was the confessor of the pope.
[2] Desmarets de St. Sorlin's Delight of the Spirit, 29th _journée_, p. 170.
CONTINUATION OF MORAL REACTION.--TARTUFFE, 1664-1669.--REAL TARTUFFES.--WHY TARTUFFE IS NOT YET A QUIETIST.
The devotee caught in the fact by the man of the world, the churchman excommunicated by the comedian--this is the meaning and aim of the _Tartuffe_.
Plato, in his Athenian Tartuffe (the Euthyphron), put this grand moral question, "Can there be _sanctity_ without _justice_?" This question, so clear in itself but so skilfully obscured by casuists, was again put forward in open daylight. The _Theatre_ re-established religious morality which had been so endangered in the _Churches_.
The author of the _Tartuffe_ chose his subject, not in society in general, but in a more limited space, in the family circle, the fireside, the holy of holies of modern life. This dramatist, this impious being was, of all men in the world, the one who had most at heart the religion of the family, though he had no family himself. He was both tender and melancholy, and sometimes, in speaking of himself and his domestic griefs, he would utter this grave but characteristic sentence: "I ought to have foreseen that one thing made me unfit for family society; which is my austerity."