He is governed throughout the whole sphere of conduct by an elaborate code of law, the administration of which is confided by the Church to the confessor. The confessor must have some definite rule to estimate the importance of sins and to know the conditions of pardon. Such a law had been elaborated by the casuists. They had put together a code of spiritual legislation, coinciding in some directions with the ordinary laws of the State, but in others going into every conceivable detail of conduct with which the merely human legislator is incompetent to deal. It was, in short, morality made into law. Here, then, we have the utmost possible elaboration of that view of morality against which the Jansenists protested: the view which assimilates it to an external or municipal law, differing from such law only in the nature of the sanctions—in substituting hell or purgatory for the gallows or the prison—and the all-comprehensive nature of its subject-matter. Not only every act which affects others, but every act affecting the man himself, and even his most secret thoughts or intentions, may come within its purview.
We must notice the way in which this system presented itself to Pascal. The casuist, in the first
