We cannot sincerely believe of a thing anything that is excluded from its idea by the necessary idea we have of it. Now it is impossible for us to conceive a thing that thinks without immediately imagining something incorporeal. All Locke’s reasonings on this point are nothing but pure quibbling. In this question above all, Locke has shown himself for what he is, an inventive logician, but a bad metaphysician and an anti-metaphysician. For he was not merely without metaphysics, but incapable of it and hostile to it. A good questioner, good at groping, but without light, — almost without eyes. He is a blind man who uses his stick well.

Irreligion, a passion. Those possessed by it to this degree make a god of the human race. They make their idol of an abstract and shapeless being, — through the necessity that irresistibly drives human nature to love and honor without measure something immaterial and infinite.

January 2.

“An offense in which the will had no part. — Fallible but not guilty. Fallen (diminished, made less), but not punishable. A mass altered, but not hateful. Yet to make this nature more pleasing, Jesus Christ clothed himself in it; he adorned it, he instructed it. Through his humanity and his love for men, he gave our actions the merit they lacked; and, forever leaving his body in the eucharist and his spirit or his words in the gospel, he made heaven perpetually present to earth and earth pleasing to heaven.” This is how he spoke, and he charmed.

“But, they said to him, God in place of man, the innocent in place of the guilty; is such a substitution admissible? — I seek, he replied, more to persuade myself than to convince myself. These are subtle things, in which nothing can be palpable. Light ideas that penetrate minds are enough. I think, then, that by sanctifying our face, our appearance, he attached to human nature and even to all its crimes (of which his death was the greatest), a memory and a feature that compels mercy.”

Religion. We must try, by every possible means, to persuade ourselves of it and convince ourselves of it. This matters to us, to our families, to our neighbors, to the human race. It is necessary to believe in it; it is not necessary that it be true. Every religion is always true with a sufficient truth. Sufficient to do better than if we did not have it.

Jansenism and Molinism. The one is more in accord with reason and the other more in accord with knowledge.

Religion. It is true or it is willed; willed by God, who imposes it on us through education and example, and still more through the usefulness that follows it. God indeed attaches such usefulness, such happiness and such virtues to it that there is no doubt he wills it.

Jansenists and Jesuits. Instinct, reasoning and imagination favor the doctrine (dogmatic) of the latter; memory, reasoning and judgment favor the dogmatic doctrine of the former. The Jansenists have more [blank], the Jesuits more persuasive.

The Augustinians seem to deny the grace of God for fear that the grace of Jesus Christ will not be sufficiently acknowledged.