Women of Modern France

Excerpt: …at the convent, she consulted her superiors as to the advisability of continuing her verse making; and upon being told that such occupation was not a means of winning the grace of Jesus Christ, she abandoned it. pg 207 Cousin maintained that the avowed principle of the Port-Royalists was the withdrawal from all worldly pleasure and attachment. ‘Marriage is a homicide; absolute renunciation is the true regime of a Christian.’ Jacqueline Pascal is an exaggeration of Port-Royal, and Port-Royal is an exaggeration of the religious spirit of the seventeenth century. Man is too little considered; all movement of the physical world comes from God; all our acts and thoughts, except those of crime and error, come from and belong to Him. Nothing is our own; there is no free will; will and reason have no power. The theory of grace is the source of all truth, virtue, and merit