Note 26 — FOOTNOTES:

I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of the Letters (1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.