they could reconcile their minds to the responsibilities, and riches, and pleasures of this naughty world. Some of the rules were to tell their most secret sins to the Abbot; and they were not to speak without being asked to do so; and when permitted, it was to be in a low voice, and in few words. They were to hang down their heads, and have their eyes on the ground, and were to go to the church two hours after midnight. When a Monk was disobedient, he was to be chastised. All had to eat in silence; and anything being wanted, a sign must be made for it. Those who went late to church, or to the table, had to be punished; and no one could receive a letter without permission. The novice was to have at least one year's probation; and the Superior being angry, the Monk must throw himself at his feet till he shall bid him arise. 9. The Carthusians built cells in a horrid desert, and lived in silence; they never tasted flesh, and only partook of fish when given to them; and their bread was made of bran. 10. The Feuillans abstained from flesh, and fish, and eggs; also from milk in any preparation; and from oil, salt, and wine; living only on pulse and water. 11. St. Dominick, who established the order bearing his name, made himself popular by his ferocity against the Albigenses. His Monks could not possess anything of their own, had to live on alms, and had to fast nearly seven months in the year, and not to eat flesh, excepting in case of sickness. They were obliged to keep perfect silence in certain places and hours. 12. The Carmelites were named, by Pope Honorius IV., Brothers of the Virgin Mary; and they had the same privileges as other mendicant Friars, with this addition, they were exempted most graciously from the pains of purgatory! (To be concluded in our next.) THE SENSE OF FORGIVENESS. (To the Editor of the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine.) No doctrine of holy Scripture can by possibility be more deeply interesting and important than that of a sinner's justification before God, consisting as it does in the full and free forgiveness of all past sin; so that the connexion between guilt and punishment is broken off, and the happy partaker of this blessing is invested with all the privileges of righteousness. Till this momentous change in a man's relation to God takes place, it is impossible that he should be happy; for the wrath of God abideth on him; he is under actual condemnation; and is liable every moment to die in his sins, and be plunged into hell. There are persons who, in their indiscreet zeal to exalt the privilege of entire sanctification to God, speak disparagingly of justification, and of the spiritual influence and enjoyments which are connected with it. But such persons have very imperfect apprehensions of divine truth, and need an Aquila and Priscilla to "expound unto them the way of God more perfectly." Justification is one of the greatest blessings that fallen men can receive at the hands of God; inasmuch as it is the foundation of all their safety and happiness both in time and eternity. Without it, there is no peace of conscience, no regenerating and sanctifying grace, no well-grounded hope of eternal life. But all these blessings follow in its train. Well may it therefore be said, (Rom. iv. 6-8,) "David describeth the BLESSEDNESS of the man to whom God, imputeth righteousness without works, saying, BLESSED are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. BLESSED is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." Nor does "this BLESSEDNESS come" exclusively upon the circumcised race. It is equally free for sinners of the Gentiles; for it flows from the mere mercy of God, which is "wide as the world;" it is conveyed through the sacrifice of Christ, which "taketh away the sin of the world ;" and it is offered to every guilty soul of man, upon the one and simple condition of faith in Christ, exercised in a penitent state of the heart so that, at whatever time any man truly believes in the Saviour, he passes from death unto life; he receives the Holy Ghost, the seal and witness of his adoption; and he becomes an heir of life eternal: the Spirit which seals him as the child and property of God, at the same time renewing his whole moral nature. According to the general tenor of holy Scripture, when any man is actually "pardoned for all that he hath done," he ENJOYS the favour and the peace of God; in consequence of which he can, with childlike confidence, place himself under the divine protection, and contemplate the solemnities of death and eternity, not only without the terror which guilt inspires, but with cheerful hope. This was the doctrine of the Wesleys; and hence they taught their spiritual children to sing, "How happy every child of grace, WHO KNOWS HIS SINS FORGIVEN! For their teaching on this subject, they were strongly censured by Bishop Warburton, Dr. Church, and a host of inferior writers. Yet they steadily persevered in bearing testimony to this truth, which they found to be perfectly scriptural, and realized in the personal experience of ten thousand witnesses. Their sons in the Gospel also maintain, with equal tenacity, that every believer in Christ is justified; and that the BLESSEDNESS of the justified is not merely nominal and imaginary, but real and permanent. To this doctrine I have lately met with a consenting testimony, which has afforded me great gratification, and which I doubt not will be equally acceptable to your numerous readers. It is that of the Rev. "Richard Chevenix Trench, M.A., Vicar of Itchen-Stoke, Hants; Professor of Divinity, King's College, London; Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford; and late Hulsean Lecturer: " and occurs in the second edition of his learned and instructive "Notes on the Miracles of our Lord," just published, pp. 202, 203. This very able writer thus expresses himself: "The absolving words, Thy sins be forgiven thee, (Matt. ix. 2,) are not to be taken as optative merely, as a desire that it might be so, but as declarative of a fact. They are the justification of the sinner; and, as declaratory of that which takes place in the purposes of God, so also effectual, shedding abroad THE SENSE OF FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION IN THE SINNER'S ᎻᎬᎪᎡᎢ. For God's justification of a sinner is not a mere word spoken about a man, but a word spoken To him, and IN him; not an act of God's immanent in himself, but transitive upon the sinner. In it there is the LOVE OF GOD, and so THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THAT LOVE SHED ABROAD IN HIS HEART in whose behalf the absolving decree has been uttered." In a note the learned writer adds, "It will be seen that I have used Rom. v. 5 ['The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us'] in a different sense from that in which it is far too often used. The history of the exposition of the verse is curious, and is not altogether foreign to the subject in hand. To Augustine's influence, no doubt, we mainly owe the loss for many centuries of its true interpretation, which Origen, Chrysostom, and Ambrose, men every one of them less penetrated with the spirit of St. Paul than he was, had yet rightly seized; but which, by his influence and frequent use of it in another sense, was so completely lost sight of, that it was not recovered anew till the time of the Reformation. He read in his Latin, Charitas Dei diffusa est in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum, qui datus est nobis. Had he read, as Ambrose reads it, (De Spir. Sanc., l. i., c. 8, § 88,) and as it should have been, effusa, (ÉKKÉxura is the original word,) it is probable he would have been saved from the mistake: for the comparison which would have been suggested with such passages as Acts ii. 17; Isaiah xxxii. 15; Ezek. xxxvi. 25; Joel ii. 28, in all which God's large and free communication of himself to men is set forth under the image of a stream from heaven to earth, would have led him to see that this love of God which is poured out in our hearts, and is here declared to be our ground of confidence in him, is his love to us, and not ours to him; that the verse is, in fact, to find its explanation from verse 8, ['GOD COMMENDETH HIS LOVE TO Us,'] and affirms the same thing. The passage is of considerable dogmatic importance. The perverted interpretation became in after-times one of the mainstays, indeed by far the chiefest one, of the Romish theory of an infused righteousness being the ground of our confidence toward God: which the true interpretation excludes, yet at the same time affirms this great truth, that God's justification of the sinner is not, as the Romanists say we hold it, an act merely declaratory, leaving the sinner, as to his real state, where it found him; but a transitive act, being not alone negatively a forgiveness of sin, but positively an imparting of the Spirit of adoption, with the sense of reconciliation, and all else into which God's love received and believed will unfold itself." Mr. Wesley speaks of the sense of forgiveness as directly and immediately consequent upon the act of justification: Mr. Trench speaks of it as included in the very act itself. In either case, the sense of forgiveness is to be expected with forgiveness; so that the penitent transgressor of God's law is authorized to utter before the mercy-seat of God, "The SENSE OF THY FAVOUR INSPIRE, T. J. NOTES ON THE LITERARY HISTORY OF FRANCE. BY GUSTAVE MASSON, B.A., UNIVERS. GALLIC. I. THE PASCAL FAMILY. PART IV. (To the Editor of the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine.) It is a pity that Mr. D'Israeli does not write a supplement to his Calamities of Authors: he might easily meet with cases for illustration, and the misfortunes of the author-tribe are quite ready to swell, under his direction, VOL. IV.-FOURTH SERIES. N a few hundred octavo pages. Meanwhile we shall bring, in the present article, our mite towards that undertaking; and we can safely affirm that the history of Pascal's Pensées is capable, by itself, of proving a strong antidote against literary vanity. For some time before his death, Pascal had been engaged in a work, which, if completed, would have no doubt borne the stamp of the gifted author's genius. It was an apologetic composition, and destined to bring the truths of Christianity home to the mind of heretics, Jews, and infidels. Pascal, however, was already suffering from the most excruciating pains, when he applied himself to his last work; and he died, leaving behind him a collection of loose unconnected Mss., which he would certainly have destroyed rather than allow them to be published in the state in which posterity has handed them down to us. The "Edinburgh Review" aptly remarks on this very subject, that "it is humiliating to think of the casualties which, possibly in many cases, have robbed posterity of some of the most precious fruits of the meditations of the wise; perhaps arrested trains of thought which would have expanded into brilliant theories, or grand discoveries; trains which, when the genial moment of inspiration has passed, it has been found impossible to recall; or which, if recalled up to the point at which they were broken off, terminate only in a wall of rock, in which the mountain-path, which had been before so clearly seen, exists no longer. It is humiliating to think that a fit of the tooth-ache, or a twinge of the gout, might have thus arrested-no more to return-the opening germ of conjecture which led on to the discovery of the differential calculus or the theory of gravitation. The condition of man, in this respect, affords, indeed, one striking proof of that combined 'greatness and misery' of his nature, on which Pascal so profoundly meditated. It is wonderful that a being, such as he, should achieve so much; it is humiliating that he must depend on such casualties for success.' Pascal's relations and friends thought then of publishing his posthumous writings. But at that time the Provincial Letters were still fresh in the recollection of everybody, whilst the Jesuits had succeeded at last in becoming all-powerful at court. Pope Clement XI., besides, solicited by Louis XIV., had endeavoured to hush up the theological quarrels which for so long embittered the Jansenists and the Jesuits against one another. Only think, under such circumstances, of sending forth into the world a book on Christian ethics, bearing the name of Blaise Pascal! Without the greatest precautions, such an act as this was capable of stirring up into a blaze the slumbering fire, and of reviving all the fury of party spirit. Etienne Perier, in his prefatory remarks to the editio princeps, describes thus the method followed by the compilers:-" Amidst this great number of thoughts, the clearest and the most finished have been selected; and we give them, such as they are, without any addition or alteration: the only difference is, that they were formerly unconnected, loose, and scattered confusedly here and there; whereas a kind of order reigns now throughout, fragments treating of similar subjects are ranged together under the same heads, whilst all the other thoughts, too obscure, or too imperfect, have been suppressed." Unfortunately Etienne Perier's declaration cannot be safely trusted, and we know for a certainty that his "without any addition or alteration" must be considered as a gross mis-statement. Alas for the pruning and * Edinburgh Review, No. 171. January, 1847, pp. 181, 182. grafting propensities of the editorial Committee! "When the Periers found themselves in possession of a variety of loose papers, which had as yet received no arrangement, they called in the advice of various friends, of whom the leaders of Port-Royal were the chief. But besides, Nicole and Arnauld, the Duke de Roannez, whose admiration for Pascal had been so unbounded, that he could not bear him out of his sight, together with the capricious Lornénie de Brienne, were associated with Etienne Perier in the preparation and arrangement of the Mss. Madame Perier's reverence for her brother made her as fearful of any alteration in what he had written, as Augustus could be of the insertion of new lines in the Æneis, and her feelings were responded to by her son. But the circumstances of the times interfered with the intention. The Jansenists were averse to any step which should interfere with that truce with their opponents, which had been brought about under the auspices of Clement IX. In Pascal's fragments were many which reflected on the Jesuits. These, therefore, they curtailed in the most unsparing manner. But, not contented with this, they altered innumerable passages, in which the force and meaning of the original suffered by their interference. A long list of such cases is given by Cousin in his second report, pp. 72, &c., &c. This work he produces authority for attributing mainly to the Duke of Roannez.' The two following paragraphs, which we borrow from the "Edinburgh Review," complete the history of this curious literary transaction : "They (the editors) deemed it not sufficient to give Pascal's remains with the statement, that they were but fragments; that many of the thoughts were very imperfectly developed; that none of them had had the advantage of the author's revision,-apologies for any deficiencies with which the world would have been fully satisfied; but they ventured upon mutilations and alterations of a most unwarrantable description. In innumerable instances, they changed words and phrases; in many others, they left out whole paragraphs, and put a sentence or two of their own in the place of them; they supplemented what they deemed imperfect with a prefatory exordium or a prefatory conclusion, without any indication as to what were the respective ventures in this rare species of literary copartnery. It must have been odd to see this Committee of critics sitting in judgment on Pascal's style, and deliberating with what alterations, additions, and expurgations it would be safe to permit the author of the Provincial Letters to appear in public.......... "It appears that, large as was the editorial discretion they assumed, or rather, large as was their want of all discretion, they had contemplated an enterprise still more audacious,-nothing less than that of completing the entire work which Pascal had projected, partly out of the materials he had left, and partly from what their own ingenuity might supply. It even appears that they had actually commenced this heterogeneous structure; and an amusing account has been left by M. Perier, both of the progress the builders of this Babel had made, and of the reasons for abandoning the design. At last,' says he, it was resolved to reject the plan, because it was felt to be almost impossible thoroughly to enter into the thoughts and the plan of the author; and, above all, of an author who was no more; and because it would not have been the work of M. Pascal, but a work altogether different,-un ouvrage tout différent. Very different, indeed! * Christian Remembrancer, vol. xiii. No. 55. January, 1847, p. 12. |