Paris, July 3, 1656

SIR,

I shall use as little ceremony with you as the worthy monk did with me when I saw him last. The moment he perceived me, he came forward, with his eyes fixed on a book which he held in his hand, and accosted me thus: “’Would you not be infinitely obliged to any one who should open to you the gates of paradise? Would you not give millions of gold to have a key by which you might gain admittance whenever you thought proper? You need not be at such expense; here is one — here are a hundred for much less money.’”

At first I was at a loss to know whether the good father was reading, or talking to me, but he soon put the matter beyond doubt by adding:

“These, sir, are the opening words of a fine book, written by Father Barry of our Society; for I never give you anything of my own.”

“What book is it?” asked I.

“Here is its title,” he replied: “Paradise opened to Philagio, in a Hundred Devotions to the Mother of God, easily practised.”

“Indeed, father! and is each of these easy devotions a sufficient passport to heaven?”

“It is,” returned he. “Listen to what follows: ‘The devotions to the Mother of God, which you will find in this book, are so many celestial keys, which will open wide to you the gates of paradise, provided you practise them’; and, accordingly, he says at the conclusion, ‘that he is satisfied if you practise only one of them.’”

“Pray, then, father, do teach me one of the easiest of them.”

“They are all easy,” he replied, “for example —‘Saluting the Holy Virgin when you happen to meet her image — saying the little chaplet of the pleasures of the Virgin — fervently pronouncing the name of Mary — commissioning the angels to bow to her for us — wishing to build her as many churches as all the monarchs on earth have done — bidding her good morrow every morning, and good night in the evening — saying the Ave Maria every day, in honour of the heart of Mary’— which last devotion, he says, possesses the additional virtue of securing us the heart of the Virgin.”

“But, father,” said I, “only provided we give her our own in return, I presume?”

“That,” he replied, “is not absolutely necessary, when a person is too much attached to the world. Hear Father Barry: ‘Heart for heart would, no doubt, be highly proper; but yours is rather too much attached to the world, too much bound up in the creature, so that I dare not advise you to offer, at present, that poor little slave which you call your heart.’ And so he contents himself with the Ave Maria which he had prescribed.”

“Why, this is extremely easy work,” said I, “and I should really think that nobody will be damned after that.”

“Alas!” said the monk, “I see you have no idea of the hardness of some people’s hearts. There are some, sir, who would never engage to repeat, every day, even these simple words, Good day, Good evening, just because such a practice would require some exertion of memory. And, accordingly, it became necessary for Father Barry to furnish them with expedients still easier, such as wearing a chaplet night and day on the arm, in the form of a bracelet, or carrying about one’s person a rosary, or an image of the Virgin. ‘And, tell me now,’ as Father Barry says, ‘if I have not provided you with easy devotions to obtain the good graces of Mary?’”

“Extremely easy indeed, father,” I observed.

“Yes,” he said, “it is as much as could possibly be done, and I think should be quite satisfactory. For he must be a wretched creature indeed, who would not spare a single moment in all his lifetime to put a chaplet on his arm, or a rosary in his pocket, and thus secure his salvation; and that, too, with so much certainty that none who have tried the experiment have ever found it to fail, in whatever way they may have lived; though, let me add, we exhort people not to omit holy living. Let me refer you to the example of this, given at p. 34; it is that of a female who, while she practised daily the devotion of saluting the images of the Virgin, spent all her days in mortal sin, and yet was saved after all, by the merit of that single devotion.”

“And how so?” cried I.

“Our Saviour,” he replied, “raised her up again, for the very purpose of showing it. So certain it is that none can perish who practise any one of these devotions.”

“My dear sir,” I observed, “I am fully aware that the devotions to the Virgin are a powerful means of salvation, and that the least of them, if flowing from the exercise of faith and charity, as in the case of the saints who have practised them, are of great merit; but to make persons believe that, by practising these without reforming their wicked lives, they will be converted by them at the hour of death, or that God will raise them up again, does appear calculated rather to keep sinners going on in their evil courses, by deluding them with false peace and foolhardy confidence, than to draw them off from sin by that genuine conversion which grace alone can effect.”

“What does it matter,” replied the monk, “by what road we enter paradise, provided we do enter it? as our famous Father Binet, formerly our Provincial, remarks on a similar subject, in his excellent book, On the Mark of Predestination. ‘Be it by hook or by crook,’ as he says, ‘what need we care, if we reach at last the celestial city.’”

“Granted,” said I; “but the great question is if we will get there at all.”

“The Virgin will be answerable for that,” returned he; “so says Father Barry in the concluding lines of his book: ‘If at the hour of death, the enemy should happen to put in some claim upon you, and occasion disturbance in the little commonwealth of your thoughts, you have only to say that Mary will answer for you, and that he must make his application to her.’”

“But, father, it might be possible to puzzle you, were one disposed to push the question a little further. Who, for example, has assured us that the Virgin will be answerable in this case?”

“Father Barry will be answerable for her,” he replied. “’As for the profit and happiness to be derived from these devotions,’ he says, ‘I will be answerable for that; I will stand bail for the good Mother.’”

“But, father, who is to be answerable for Father Barry?”

“How!” cried the monk; “for Father Barry? is he not a member of our Society; and do you need to be told that our Society is answerable for all the books of its members? It is highly necessary and important for you to know about this. There is an order in our Society, by which all booksellers are prohibited from printing any work of our fathers without the approbation of our divines and the permission of our superiors. This regulation was passed by Henry III, 10th May 1583, and confirmed by Henry IV, 20th December 1603, and by Louis XIII, 14th February 1612; so that the whole of our body stands responsible for the publications of each of the brethren. This is a feature quite peculiar to our community. And, in consequence of this, not a single work emanates from us which does not breathe the spirit of the Society. That, sir, is a piece of information quite apropos.”

“My good father,” said I, “you oblige me very much, and I only regret that I did not know this sooner, as it will induce me to pay considerably more attention to your authors.”

“I would have told you sooner,” he replied, “had an opportunity offered; I hope, however, you will profit by the information in future, and, in the meantime, let us prosecute our subject. The methods of securing salvation which I have mentioned are, in my opinion, very easy, very sure, and sufficiently numerous; but it was the anxious wish of our doctors that people should not stop short at this first step, where they only do what is absolutely necessary for salvation and nothing more. Aspiring, as they do without ceasing, after the greater glory of God, they sought to elevate men to a higher pitch of piety; and, as men of the world are generally deterred from devotion by the strange ideas they have been led to form of it by some people, we have deemed it of the highest importance to remove this obstacle which meets us at the threshold. In this department Father Le Moine has acquired much fame, by his work entitled Devotion Made Easy, composed for this very purpose. The picture which he draws of devotion in this work is perfectly charming. None ever understood the subject before him. Only hear what he says in the beginning of his work: ‘Virtue has never as yet been seen aright; no portrait of her hitherto produced, has borne the least verisimilitude. It is by no means surprising that so few have attempted to scale her rocky eminence. She has been held up as a cross-tempered dame, whose only delight is in solitude; she has been associated with toil and sorrow; and, in short, represented as the foe of sports and diversions, which are, in fact, the flowers of joy and the seasoning of life.’”

“But, father, I am sure, I have heard, at least, that there have been great saints who led extremely austere lives.”

“No doubt of that,” he replied; “but still, to use the language of the doctor, ‘there have always been a number of genteel saints, and well-bred devotees’; and this difference in their manners, mark you, arises entirely from a difference of humours. ‘I am far from denying,’ says my author, ‘that there are devout persons to be met with, pale and melancholy in their temperament, fond of silence and retirement, with phlegm instead of blood in their veins, and with faces of clay; but there are many others of a happier complexion, and who possess that sweet and warm humour, that genial and rectified blood, which is the true stuff that joy is made of.’

“You see,” resumed the monk, “that the love of silence and retirement is not common to all devout people; and that, as I was saying, this is the effect rather of their complexion than their piety. Those austere manners to which you refer are, in fact, properly the character of a savage and barbarian, and, accordingly, you will find them ranked by Father Le Moine among the ridiculous and brutal manners of a moping idiot. The following is the description he has drawn of one of these in the seventh book of his Moral Pictures. ‘He has no eyes for the beauties of art or nature. Were he to indulge in anything that gave him pleasure, he would consider himself oppressed with a grievous load. On festival days, he retires to hold fellowship with the dead. He delights in a grotto rather than a palace, and prefers the stump of a tree to a throne. As to injuries and affronts, he is as insensible to them as if he had the eyes and ears of a statue. Honour and glory are idols with whom he has no acquaintance, and to whom he has no incense to offer. To him a beautiful woman is no better than a spectre; and those imperial and commanding looks — those charming tyrants who hold so many slaves in willing and chainless servitude — have no more influence over his optics than the sun over those of owls,’ &c.”

“Reverend sir,” said I, “had you not told me that Father Le Moine was the author of that description, I declare I would have guessed it to be the production of some profane fellow who had drawn it expressly with the view of turning the saints into ridicule. For if that is not the picture of a man entirely denied to those feelings which the Gospel obliges us to renounce, I confess that I know nothing of the matter.”

“You may now perceive, then, the extent of your ignorance,” he replied; “for these are the features of a feeble, uncultivated mind, ‘destitute of those virtuous and natural affections which it ought to possess,’ as Father Le Moine says at the close of that description. Such is his way of teaching ‘Christian virtue and philosophy,’ as he announces in his advertisement; and, in truth, it cannot be denied that this method of treating devotion is much more agreeable to the taste of the world than the old way in which they went to work before our times.”

“There can be no comparison between them,” was my reply, “and I now begin to hope that you will be as good as your word.”

“You will see that better by-and-by,” returned the monk. “Hitherto I have only spoken of piety in general, but, just to show you more in detail how our fathers have disencumbered it of its toils and troubles, would it not be most consoling to the ambitious to learn that they may maintain genuine devotion along with an inordinate love of greatness?”

“What, father! even though they should run to the utmost excess of ambition?”

“Yes,” he replied; “for this would be only a venial sin, unless they sought after greatness in order to offend God and injure the State more effectually. Now venial sins do not preclude a man from being devout, as the greatest saints are not exempt from them. ‘Ambition,’ says Escobar, ‘which consists in an inordinate appetite for place and power, is of itself a venial sin; but when such dignities are coveted for the purpose of hurting the commonwealth, or having more opportunity to offend God, these adventitious circumstances render it mortal.’”

“Very savoury doctrine, indeed, father.”

“And is it not still more savoury,” continued the monk, “for misers to be told, by the same authority, ‘that the rich are not guilty of mortal sin by refusing to give alms out of their superfluity to the poor in the hour of their greatest need? — scio in gravi pauperum necessitate divites non dando superflua, non peccare mortaliter.’”

“Why truly,” said I, “if that be the case, I give up all pretension to skill in the science of sins.”

“To make you still more sensible of this,” returned he, “you have been accustomed to think, I suppose, that a good opinion of one’s self, and a complacency in one’s own works, is a most dangerous sin? Now, will you not be surprised if I can show you that such a good opinion, even though there should be no foundation for it, is so far from being a sin that it is, on the contrary, the gift of God?”

“Is it possible, father?”

“That it is,” said the monk; “and our good Father Garasse shows it in his French work, entitled Summary of the Capital Truths of Religion: ‘It is a result of commutative justice that all honest labour should find its recompense either in praise or in self-satisfaction. When men of good talents publish some excellent work, they are justly remunerated by public applause. But when a man of weak parts has wrought hard at some worthless production, and fails to obtain the praise of the public, in order that his labour may not go without its reward, God imparts to him a personal satisfaction, which it would be worse than barbarous injustice to envy him. It is thus that God, who is infinitely just, has given even to frogs a certain complacency in their own croaking.’”

“Very fine decisions in favour of vanity, ambition, and avarice!” cried I; “and envy, father, will it be more difficult to find an excuse for it?”

“That is a delicate point,” he replied. “We require to make use here of Father Bauny’s distinction, which he lays down in his Summary of Sins. —‘Envy of the spiritual good of our neighbour is mortal but envy of his temporal good is only venial.’”

“And why so, father?”

“You shall hear, said he. “’For the good that consists in temporal things is so slender, and so insignificant in relation to heaven, that it is of no consideration in the eyes of God and His saints.’”

“But, father, if temporal good is so slender, and of so little consideration, how do you come to permit men’s lives to be taken away............