imputed, as M. le Moine shows in the same place and in what follows.
Would you wish to have other authorities for this? Here they are."

    "All modern ones, however," whispered my Jansenist friend.

    "So I perceive," said I to him aside; and then, turning to the
monk: "O my dear sir," cried I, "what a blessing this will be to
some persons of my acquaintance! I must positively introduce them to
you. You have never, perhaps, met with people who had fewer sins to
account for all your life. For, in the first place, they never think
of God at all; their vices have got the better of their reason; they
have never known either their weakness or the physician who can cure
it; they have never thought of 'desiring the health of their soul,'
and still less of 'praying to God to bestow it'; so that, according to
M. le Moine, they are still in the state of baptismal innocence.
They have 'never had a thought of loving God or of being contrite
for their sins'; so that, according to Father Annat, they have never
committed sin through the want of charity and penitence. Their life is
spent in a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures, in the course of
which they have not been interrupted by the slightest remorse. These
excesses had led me to imagine that their perdition was inevitable;
but you, father, inform me that these same excesses secure their
salvation. Blessings on you, my good father, for this way of
justifying people! Others prescribe painful austerities for healing
the soul; but you show that souls which may be thought desperately
distempered are in quite good health. What an excellent device for
being happy both in this world and in the next! I had always
supposed that the less a man thought of God, the more he sinned;
but, from what I see now, if one could only succeed in bringing
himself not to think upon God at all, everything would be pure with
him in all time coming. Away with your half-and-half sinners, who
retain some sneaking affection for virtue! They will be damned every
one of them, these semi-sinners. But commend me to your arrant
sinners- hardened, unalloyed, out-and-out, thorough-bred sinners. Hell
is no place for them; they have cheated the devil, purely by virtue of
their devotion to his service!"

    The good father, who saw very well the connection between these
consequences and his principle, dexterously evaded them; and,
maintaining his temper, either from good nature or policy, he merely
replied: "To let you understand how we avoid these inconveniences, you
must know that, while we affirm that these reprobates to whom you
refer would be without sin if they had no thoughts of conversion and
no desires to devote themselves to God, we maintain that they all
actually have such thoughts and desires, and that God never
permitted a man to sin without giving him previously a view of the
evil which he contemplated, and a desire, either to avoid the offence,
or at all events to implore his aid to enable him to avoid it; and
none but Jansenists will assert the contrary."

    "Strange! father," returned I; "is this, then, the heresy of the
Jansenists, to deny that every time a man commits a sin he is troubled
with a remorse of conscience, in spite of which, he 'leaps the fence
and transgresses,' as Father Bauny has it? It is rather too good a
joke to be made a heretic for that. I can easily believe that a man
may be damned for not having good thoughts; but it never would have
entered my head to imagine that any man could be subjected to that
doom for not believing that all mankind must have good thoughts!
But, father, I hold myself bound in conscience to disabuse you and
to inform you that there are thousands of people who have no such
desires- who sin without regret- who sin with delight- who make a
boast of sinning. And who ought to know better about these things than
yourself.? You cannot have failed to have confessed some of those to
whom I allude; for it is among persons of high rank that they are most
generally to be met with. But mark, father, the dangerous consequences
of your maxim. Do you not perceive what effect it may have on those
libertines who like nothing better than to find out matter of doubt in
religion? What a handle do you give them, when you assure them, as
an article of faith, that, on every occasion when they commit a sin,
they feel an inward presentiment of the evil and a desire to avoid it?
Is it not obvious that, feeling convinced by their own experience of
the falsity of your doctrine on this point, which you say is a
matter of faith, they will extend the inference drawn from this to all
the other points? They will argue that, since you are not
trustworthy in one article, you are to be suspected in them all; and
thus you shut them up to conclude either that religion is false or
that you must know very little about it."

    Here my friend the Jansenist, following up my remarks, said to
him: "You would do well, father, if you wish to preserve your
doctrine, not to explain so precisely as you have done to us what
you mean by actual grace. For, how could you, without forfeiting all
credit in the estimation of men, openly declare that nobody sins
without having previously the knowledge of his weakness, and of a
physician, or the desire of a cure, and of asking it of God? Will it
be believed, on your word, that those who are immersed in avarice,
impurity, blasphemy, duelling, revenge, robbery and sacrilege, have
really a desire to embrace chastity, humility, and the other Christian
virtues? Can it be conceived that those philosophers who boasted so
loudly of the powers of nature, knew its infirmity and its
physician? Will you maintain that those who held it as a settled maxim
that is not God that bestows virtue, and that no one ever asked it
from him,' would think of asking it for themselves? Who can believe
that the Epicureans, who denied a divine providence, ever felt any
inclination to pray to God? men who said that 'it would be an insult
to invoke the Deity in our necessities, as if he were capable of
wasting a thought on beings like us?' In a word, how can it be
imagined that idolaters and atheists, every time they are tempted to
the commission of sin, in other words, infinitely often during their
lives, have a desire to pray to the true God, of whom they are