It is quite needless here to discuss the literary qualities of Pascal's letters, but in the fourth letter Pascal began his direct and fearful indictment of the Jesuits. The next six letters contain the exposure of Jesuitical moral teaching which is the most serious point in his work, and the remaining letters--from the tenth to the eighteenth, which are addressed to the Jesuits--are mainly concerned with substantiating his indictment. Although one may trust that the majority of readers are familiar with Pascal's famous work, a short analysis of the six letters (the fifth to the tenth) must be premised.
The chief quarrel between the Solitaries and the Jesuits was, as I said, a question of moral, not speculative, theology. They accused the Jesuits of accommodating the principles of Christian morality to an immoral generation. St. Cyran and Arnauld had already quoted many passages of Jesuit works in proof of this, and Pascal and his friends now searched the whole field of Jesuit casuistry for further proofs. In the fifth letter, for instance, Pascal shows how the Jesuits attenuate the obligation of fasting. A man may, on a fast-day, drink any quantity of wine, hippocras, or honey and water. If a man cannot sleep without supper, he is not bound to fast; in a sense that is a just decision, but Father Escobar goes on to say that he need not meet his obligation by deferring to the evening the "collation" which is permitted on fast-days, as no man is bound to alter the order of his meals. Again, a man who has exhausted himself by vice is not bound to fast; and Pascal might have added that the Jesuits excused a wife from fasting if her husband thought it interfered with her attractiveness (Tamburini), a husband if it weakened his sexual faculty (Filliutius), and a maiden if it lessened the charms on which she relied to secure a husband (Tamburini).
After this satirical essay on fasting made easy, Pascal passes, in the sixth letter, to the obligation of almsgiving and cognate matters. Wealthy Christians were bound by the letter of the Gospel to give to the poor out of their superfluous goods, and Pascal quoted the great Jesuit theologian Vasquez learnedly proving that "you will scarcely find such a thing as superfluous goods among seculars, even in the case of kings." That was a comfortable doctrine for the rich, but the Jesuits had a word for the poor. Could a valet who considered himself underpaid help himself to his masters goods to the extent of the deficiency? Yes, said Father Bauny. And since Jesuit confessors had many curious cases submitted to them by valets at that time, their theologians worked out the servant's position with great nicety. If it were very inconvenient to change his master, the valet might even hold the ladder by which his master climbed to an illicit adventure; though in this extreme case, the master must scold much before the valet is justified.