Away with your half-and-half sinners, who
retain some sneaking affection for virtue! They will be damned every
one of them, these semi-sinners. But commend me to your arrant
sinners- hardened, unalloyed, out-and-out, thorough-bred sinners. Hell
is no place for them; they have cheated the devil, purely by virtue of
their devotion to his service!"
The good father, who saw very well the connection between these
consequences and his principle, dexterously evaded them; and,
maintaining his temper, either from good nature or policy, he merely
replied: "To let you understand how we avoid these inconveniences, you
must know that, while we affirm that these reprobates to whom you
refer would be without sin if they had no thoughts of conversion and
no desires to devote themselves to God, we maintain that they all
actually have such thoughts and desires, and that God never
permitted a man to sin without giving him previously a view of the
evil which he contemplated, and a desire, either to avoid the offence,
or at all events to implore his aid to enable him to avoid it; and
none but Jansenists will assert the contrary."
"Strange! father," returned I; "is this, then, the heresy of the
Jansenists, to deny that every time a man commits a sin he is troubled
with a remorse of conscience, in spite of which, he 'leaps the fence
and transgresses,' as Father Bauny has it? It is rather too good a
joke to be made a heretic for that.
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