Note 187 — LETTER IX.

The Jesuits raised a great outcry against Pascal for having, in this letter, as they alleged, turned the worship of the Virgin into ridicule. Nicole seriously undertakes his defence, and draws several distinctions between true and false devotion to the Virgin. The Mariolatry or Mary-worship, of Pascal and the Port-Royalists, was certainly a different sort of thing from that practised in the Church of Rome; but it is sad to see the straits to which these sincere devotees were reduced, in their attempts to reconcile this practice with the honor due to God and his Son.