Note 122 — LETTER IV.

When Madame du Valois, a lady of birth and high accomplishments, one of the nuns of Port-Royal, among other trials by which she was harassed and tormented for not signing the formulary condemning Jansenius, was threatened with being deprived of the benefit of the sacraments at the hour of death, she replied: “If, at the awful hour of death, I should be deprived of those assistances which the Church grants to all her children, then God himself will, by his grace, immediately and abundantly supply their instrumentality. I know, indeed, that it is most painful to approach the awful hour of death without an outward participation in the sacraments; but it is better dying to enter into heaven, though without the sacraments, for the cause of truth, than, receiving the sacraments, to be cited to irrevocable judgment for committing perjury.” (Narrative of Dem. of Port-Royal, p. 176.)