A similar observation may be applied to the powerful appeals, in the early Protestant writers, to the moral judgment and moral feelings of the human race, from those casuistical subtleties, with which the schoolmen and monks of the middle ages had studied to obscure the light of nature, and to stifle the voice of conscience. These subtleties were precisely analogous in their spirit to the pia et religiosa calliditas, afterwards adopted in the casuistry of the Jesuits, and so inimitably exposed by Pascal in the Provincial Letters. The arguments against them employed by the Reformers, cannot, in strict propriety, be considered as positive accessions to the stock of human knowledge; but what scientific discoveries can be compared to them in value![1]
From this period may be dated the decline[2] of that worst of
- ↑ "Et tamen ni doctores, angelici, cherubici, seraphici non modo universam philosophiam ac theologiam erroribus quam plurimis inquinarunt; verum etiam in philosophiam moralem invexere sacerrima ista principia probabilismi, methodi dirifjendi intentionem, reservations mentalis, peccati philosophici, quibus Jesuitce etiamnum mirifice delectantur."—Heinecc. Elem. Histor. Phil. § cii. See also the references.
With respect to the ethics of the Jesuits, which exhibit a very fair picture of the general state of that science, prior to the Reformation, see the Provincial Letters; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, vol. iv. p. 354; Dornford's Translation of Putter's Historical Development of the Present Political Constitution of the Germanic Empire, vol. ii. p. 6; and the Appendix to Penrose's Bampton Lectures. - ↑ I have said, the decline of this heresy for it was by no means immediately extirpated even in the reformed churches. "As late as the year 1598, Daniel Hoffman, Professor of Divinity in the University of Helmstadt, laying hold of some particular opinions of Luther, extravagantly maintained, that philosophy was the mortal enemy of religion; that truth was divisible into two branches, the one philosophical, and the other theological; and that what was true in philosophy, was false in theology."—Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 18.
