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What is the hope of the American pulpit, as represented by these the two greatest living exponents of it? This is a deeply interesting question. In some respects the prospect is very bright, in others not so bright. Such great preachers bring into the Christian pulpit new freedom, nature, rationality, common sense, and common interest, genial hope and breadth of religious views, culture, and relief from narrow intolerance and oppression in religious things.

But in addition to the loftiest thought and the freest sympathy, to the most scientific intelligence and hospitality to general ideas of the advancement of knowledge, there should be more of clear, primitive, simple faith in the divine doctrines of the gospel, and confidence in the attractions of the cross upon the heart. In American preaching we lack what the best Scotch, French, and German preachers have-unction. There is a marvelous degree of keen intellectual power among us, but little of Pauline spiritual sensibility. Very few American preachers, although their sermons excel English and European sermons in solid substance of thought, and although they sometimes utter moving, piercing, and passionate words, have the ability to move others, because, with some rare exceptions, they almost utterly lack the first quality of moving others— feeling.

ARTICLE VI.-CASUISTRY.

SYSTEMATIC casuistry is properly but the application of ethical principles to particular instances of duty. If moral science be distributed, as it has been by able writers, into two parts, speculative and practical,—the theory of morals and the application of the principles of morals to practice, casuistry is the proper name for the latter department. But casuistry, like astrology, has come to signify to most minds at the present time something very different from a scientific treatise on practical morality. By many, perhaps most, it would now be defined somewhat after the manner of Le Feore, the preceptor of Louis XIII, who called it "the art of quibbling with God;" or perhaps as the art of mystifying for the sake of ensnaring weak consciences. From the diligent cultivation of this department of science under the name of Theologia Moralis by the Jesuits, casuistry has become almost synonymous with Jesuitism, in the offensive sense of that term. The radical vice in their systems that have been elaborated with so much diligence and taught so assiduously in their schools for training candidates for the priesthood, lay in the fact that they were wrought out in the interest of the confessional. Consciously or unconsciously the authors and teachers of moral theology, in its practical applications, seem to have been governed by a single aim to give to the confessional lordship over the conscience. By multiplying moral distinctions in kind and degree, almost endlessly in application to concrete instances of duty, adepts in this kind of moral theology were able, under that most convenient distinction of mortal and venial sin, to lead unsuspecting penitents to acknowledgments of any degree of guilt, or to dismiss the grossest offenders with consciences disburdened from all sense of wrong. Vice, falsehood, robbery, murder, could find an excuse somewhere in ignorance, in the severity of the temptation, in some compulsion, in some righteous end intended, or some good resulting, or if not otherwise, could be shielded against the penal consequences of mortal sin

under the sheltering wing of that marvelous doctrine of casuistical refinement-probabilism. The casuistry of the Jesuits indeed seems to have culminated in the multiplicity and subtlety of the distinctions elaborated in this department of its teaching. It was the part upon which Pascal in his Provincial Letters struck his most effective blows of argument and ridicule. As such culmination of the practical moral theology of the Jesuits and also as the occasion of one of the bitterest and most important theological controversies of the last two centuries, as well as for its relations to our subject, it seems to demand from us something more than this mere incidental mention.

The original germ of the doctrine of probabilism, so-called, is to be found in a sentiment uttered by the Spanish Dominican Bartholomew de Medina, in his commentary on the Summa Theologiæ of Thomas Aquinas, to the effect that an opinion is lawful if probable, although its opposite is more probable. It was Vasquez, a noted Jesuit, however, who first formally advocated the doctrine of probabilism as applied to morality, that if an act has a probable support, it is lawful. This probable support may be from one's own reason or from the authority of others.

The doctrine was elaborated with the most refined subtlety of logic to the extreme of license. Pascal quotes the following language of Layman, one of the leading Jesuit moralists, in which he is expressly supported by high authority: "A teacher, being consulted, may give counsel not only probable in his own opinion, but contrary to his own opinion, if it is esteemed probable by others, when this counsel contrary to his own happens to be more favorable and more agreeable to the person who consults him,-si forte et illi favorabilior seu exoptatior sit. But I say further, that he will not transgress reason if he give to those who consult him counsel held as probable by any learned man, when even he is himself assured that it is absolutely false."

The batteries of the Port Royalists under the lead of Arnauld and Pascal, irresistible as they were, did not utterly destroy this doctrine, so convenient for confessional uses. A controversy sprang up between the Probabilists and the Probabilior

ists, who held that only the more probable opinion could be safely followed in morals, which raged furiously and long. So late as 1747, nearly a century after Pascal published his first Provincial Letter, which was early in 1656, we find the system presented in all the formal exactness and completeness of mathematical science, with a formidable array of forty-nine definitions, seventeen axioms, twenty-nine suppositions, besides postulates, propositions, corollaries, and scholia, in a work entitled Probabilismus methodo mathematica demonstratus auctore Patre Pithanophilo. The work was first published anonymously, and although printed in Pavia, was announced as from Lyons. Controversy followed, in which the author, however, took no part. In this treatise the Probable is defined as that which rests on solid and large foundation. The first proposition, expressed in the technicalities of the treatise, is explained in a scholium to mean this;—that he is equally safe in conscience who follows the probable on the side of liberty, as he who follows the equally probable on the side of law; or the more probable, whether absolute or relative, whether on the side of liberty or of law; nor is he so much less safe in so far as he heeds the consideration of probability. From this proposition, with its formal demonstration, the following corollaries, with others, are deduced; that it does not concern the safety of conscience, whether the probability is greater or less; and that all the opinions on morals of any classic school whatever are of the highest degree of safety, because they are probable.

We may easily conjecture what would be the legitimate character of a confessional thoroughly indoctrinated in such principles, and what the character of the Jesuitical morality thus authoritatively inculcated. Especially is to be noted in estimating the Jesuitical influence of such teaching the fact that the whole system was directed toward determining what was not wrong. The positive inculcation of morality was wholly aside from the aim of the system. Moreover, it was especially wrought out to shield the penitent and mitigate or wholly remove the guilt of his act. Everything is lawful which is not prohibited; and nothing is prohibited which is probable, that is, which rests on some solid and large foundation, and the opinion of any eminent moralist is a sufficiently solid and large

foundation, and even some conviction, or feeling, or design in the doer himself that could be assigned as the ground of the action; these two principles could readily be made to justify any act whatever. If we bear in mind that the elaboration of these principles was the proper and natural outgrowth and expression of the practice of the church and of the age, and that accordingly the practice must have outrun in license and ethical laxness the doctrine of the books and of the schools of theology, we shall not be very incredulous in regard to the debasement and corruption of piety and morals which provoked the zeal of the pure-minded Pascal and his coadjutors of Port Royal.

It will conduce to our object to take one more view of the outworking of the moral theology of the Jesuits. In a little posthumous work published in 1840, superiorum permissu, of John Baptist Faure, of the Society of the Jesuits, pronounced "the most distinguished theologian of his age," we find four casuistical questions resolved with great learning and intellectual ability. The first of these questions is: "whether a probable opinion concerning the present fitness [to receive absolution] of a penitent is sufficient, or is it necessary rather that the confessor have an opinion morally certain." To this the author replies: "It is approved that a probable opinion suffice." The second question is: "How may the priest form this probable opinion respecting the fitness of the penitent?" In reply to this question he gives the teaching of Suarez and the old theologians, that the priest "must trust the declarations of the penitent as to his own fitness," averring that this rule was held in the light of an axiom by the old authorities. The third and fourth questions respect habitual delinquents and backsliders, and inquire "whether it is safer for the sacredness of the sacrament, the benefit of the penitent, and the safety of the confessor's conscience alike, to impart absolution to the penitent, when gravely and seriously affirming his fitness, or to deny or to defer it." After a long and learned discussion, the author concludes that it is the opinion of all theologians and doctors that "the confessor is bound under heavy sanction of guilt to absolve the confessing penitent."

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