Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/281

 268 F. WINTEETON I said, for instance, that God saw the future possible acts of man through His ' supercomprehension ' of human nature. Given a being of a certain intelligence, he will be right x times in his guesses as to what a given man will do in given circumstances. If his intelligence is twice, thrice, four times as great, he will be right 2#, 3x, 4x times in his guesses. And if his intelligence = oo, then x = oo also, which means that God will be always right. The majority of Jesuits, however, maintain that God knows the future possible acts of man 'in themselves and without any medium,' which is clearly no answer at all to the question. But to return : in all questions, the Professors of the Society knew the general direction that was considered safe, and were coerced only when 'they went too far to the right hand or to the left. If Molinism, therefore, understood in general as a system of Indeterminism, became the doctrine of the Society, it was because the majority declared in its favour, and the Generals, in consequence of this verdict of public opinion, gradually eliminated from the professorial sphere those who were opposed to it. A remark which is not essential, but which serves to show what curious inconsistencies we sometimes meet with both amongst individuals and public bodies, is that, at the very time when the Jesuits stood up the most strenuously for the doctrine of Free-will, they were (not without reason as to some members of the Order) accused of laxity in their system of Ethics. It would have seemed more natural for them to have been accused of exaggerated severity, since they main- tained so completely the responsibility of man. But the latter accusation was never made against any Jesuit, so far as I am aware. If a Jansenist or a Thomist fell into sin, he might have said, with some appearance of a reasonable excuse: " I have not received efficacious grace"; or " I have not been physically premotioned to resist sin ". And whether such excuses have any value or none according to these systems, is no matter at all ; it would seem that excessive laxity ought to be found on their side, if found any- where. And yet they were by far the severest moralists. Perhaps the Jesuits, too confident in the speculative worth of their principles, did not think enough of reducing them to practice ; or it may be that their opponents, instinctively feeling their weakness on that point, strove to hide it as much as possible by extreme and inconsistent rigidity in their ethical theories. The 17th century dawned in the midst of these contro- versies, which, ending in nothing, only tended to bring