PORT-ROYAL. Antoine LE MAISTRE (1608-1658), Jansenist...

PORT-ROYAL. Antoine LE MAISTRE (1608-1658), Jansenist and man of letters, first solitary of Port-Royal des Champs, brother of Lemaistre de Sacy. L.A., December 8, 1657, [to Antoine Singlin (1607-1664), Jansenist, spiritual director of Port-Royal and Blaise Pascal]; 3 1/2 pages in-4 filled with small handwriting with a few corrections.
Rare and beautiful letter from this Port-Royal recluse.
"Mon tres cher pere, Enfin il a pleu a Dieu de benir les reproches que vous me fistes dans votre penultieme voyage de ma froideur & de ma contrainte avec mon frere qui par la tentation du Diable laquelle me paroist maintenant toute claire, avoit passe en une espece d'eloignement. You wouldn't believe how much I had to groan & pray to draw God's spirit into my soul & make an effective renewal there by changing a coldness & indifference of 20 years into a friendship more than fraternal & into a tenderness all of charity. I would never have succeeded if I hadn't appealed to the help of our Mothers and of my brother myself, to whom I had spoken about it through them. Their exhortations to do me violence were useless. For I know from several experiences that old ills that the Devil still aggravates, can only be cured in me by the infusion of God's spirit, which changes my heart, and not by human efforts, which never change my heart, even though they stir my spirit. I really & sensibly experienced this in this encounter. And I did not feel more sensitively the first & most ardent movements of penitence that God gave me 20 years ago than I felt these last ones of an affection & of a cordiality which spread in my soul in the middle of my prayer & of many tears which still flow. But what made me see even more clearly that the spirit of God was changing me and warming me was that, hearing Mass and being before God, I suddenly felt a new affection for you, my dear father, even though I wasn't thinking about it at the time. Otherwise I would have doubted the truth of this gift from God, because God never destroys good in order to destroy evil. I confess that this testimony of his goodness and mercy towards me confounds me and touches me deeply. For it is a prodigious thing that He who made heaven and earth should allow Himself to be fleshed out by the prayers of wretched creatures & should actually & appreciably imprint in the heart of a person the tender and ardent friendship He asks of Him prostrate on the ground for a person He must love more than Himself & whom He almost never loved in fact & with a merely human affection. It is in these encounters that I see that nothing makes us more aware of God's infinite greatness than the infinity of his goodness and love for mankind, and that he only requires deep humility and an absolute recognition of our powerlessness and weaknesses to make us feel the power of his grace and the gentleness of his Holy Spirit, who tenderizes us in such a long-standing hardness of heart, without us doing ourselves any human violence for this change, which we feel is impossible because we are not stronger than ourselves. He wants us to do him violence by the importunity and violence of the prayers we offer him. I have no doubt, my dear father, that your heart's desire, which you have testified to in so many encounters on this subject, has strengthened those of our Mothers and of my brother. For being as poor as I am, I need to be assisted by all of you".... Etc.