“They want to find an imaginary mean between cupidity and charity,” says Arnaud, “as though our love could end and rest in any object other than God,… - Bernard Groethuysen

“Scripture and the Fathers recognize only two principles of all human actions,” says Bishop Colbert, “charity, the principle of all good actions; cupidity, the principle of all bad ones. The Jesuits, on the contrary, introduce a host of principles of human actions.” There would thus be actions which were neither good nor evil, “an innumerable multitude of indifferent actions, of no consequence either for good or for ill.” ... Thus man would have constituted for himself a sphere where there was no longer any question between himself and God either of sin or of virtue. ... God, at the last judgment, would not ask him to account for actions which were unrelated to his salvation and which did not concern the divinity. In that area, the Christian would enjoy a legitimate freedom, without fear of constantly sinning; he would be a sinner only when the occasion of sin arose, in specific cases. The rest of the time he would live between heaven and hell, between charity and concupiscence.

Was he a sinner? Possibly. But could his class, the bourgeoisie, be condemned as a whole? The Church did not realize how secure he felt when it spoke to him of damnation. Would God send a whole class to hell, the class of the respectable? Who, then, would be in heaven? The common people? That would be hard to imagine!

The Church, sensing that the middle class was slipping out of its grasp, certainly tried to create patterns of living which would enable the bourgeois to remain a bourgeois as well as a Christian; that is, to carry out his economic and social functions while preserving the features of a son of the Church. But it never succeeded in hallowing the aspirations of the new middle class by giving them a religious basis.