So with the mortal theological wars in which so much ink has been shed. Who has not read of the disputes between the Arians and Semi-Arians and their enemies, when orthodoxy became so nice that a slip in a single expression, the use or omission of a single word, sufficed to make a man a heretic,--when every heresy produced a new creed, and every creed a new heresy? The shelves of our public libraries groan under the weight of huge folios and quartos once hurled at each other by the giants of divinity, which never would have been published but for their confused notions, or failure to discriminate the meaning, of certain technical and oft-recurring terms. Beginning with discordant ideas of what is meant by the words Will, Necessity, Unity, Law, Person,--terms vital in theology,--the more they argued, the farther they were apart, and while fancying they were battling with real adversaries, were, Quixote-like, tilting at windmills, or fighting with shadows, till at last utter
“Confusion umpire sat, And by deciding worse embroiled the fray.”
The whole vast science of casuistry, which once occupied the brains and tongues of the Schoolmen, turned upon nice, hair-splitting verbal distinctions, as ridiculous as the disputes of the orthodox Liliputians and the heretical Blefuscudians about the big ends and the little ends of the eggs. The readers of Pascal will remember the fierce wars in the Sorbonne between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, touching the doctrine of “efficacious” and “sufficient” grace. The question was, “Whether all men received from God _sufficient grace_ for their conversion.” The Jesuits maintained the affirmative; the Jansenists insisted that this _sufficient_ grace would never be _efficacious_, unless accompanied by _special_ grace. “Then the _sufficient_ grace, which is not _efficacious_, is a contradiction in terms,” cried the Jesuits; “and, besides, it is a heresy!” We need not trace the history of the logomachy that followed, which Pascal has immortalized in his “Provincial Letters,”--letters which De Maistre denounces as “Les Menteurs,” but which the Jesuits found to be both “sufficient” and “efficacious” for their utter discomfiture. The theological student will recall the microscopic distinctions; the fine-spun attenuations; the spider-like threads of meaning; the delicate, infinitesimal verbal shavings of the grave and angelic doctors; how one subtle disputant, with syllabical penetration, would discover a heresy in his opponent’s monosyllables, while the other would detect a schism in his antagonist’s conjunctions, till finally, after having filled volumes enough with the controversy to form a library, the microscopic point at issue, which had long been invisible, was whittled down to nothing.