“ How Pascal applies the principle we must now see. He begins with man, in order to arrive at God. This is the order which his own personal experience, the history of his own soul, suggested; for as a student of Montaigne, that prince of sceptics and careless mockers, he had stood within the terrible shadow of universal doubt, and his heart, gnawed by that worm of unbelief to which the preceding century had given birth, had for a time almost despaired of finding any remedy for the weaknesses, the contradictions, the miseries of human nature. ”

“ It is not the abstract truth that he propounds to us, but truth gathered up into a human heart, truth completed and realised by its moral effects, truth presented in that incarnation of which the incarnation of the Diyine Word has been the pledge and foundation. It is here that one may justly say, 'The voice is at the full only in the echo.' To insist that all theology, every defence of Christianity, should be a drama or a confession, would be going much too far ”

“ It is impossible to clear the religion of Pascal's declining years from the taint of superstition. As his health grew feebler he became increasingly subject to fits of depression, and had recourse to austerities which aggravated the physical mischief and shortened his days. It is inexpressibly touching to watch this fiery yet loving spirit burdened with its frail and morbid organism, striving to get nearer to God by a daily martyrdom of self. ”

“ Thy God shall be my God. Forgetfulness of the world and of all hut God. He is found only by the ways taught in the Gospel. Greatness of the human soul. Righteous Father, the world has not known Thee, but I have known Thee. ”

“ If Pascal's pleading for religion is suffused with personal emotion, it is because he finds the basis of faith not in the intellect but in the heart. His constant thought, as Dr. Tulloch remarks, is that "religion is born not of science but of love and faith." "Pascal," says Neander, "is the advocate of that evidence which is superior to all reasoning, and is founded on the immediate consciousness. His appeal is to a truth which is inseparable from the -very nature of the soul, and it is from the heart that he derives intuitive certainty. ”

“ Let it once be admitted that the conscience is to be directed by an external rather than by an internal authority, through a discipline of confession and penance reduced to an elaborate scientific system, and one has no right to be scandalized at the fruits which the principle bears, when applied with the aim of driving none to despair and losing none from the Church. In the hands of those who, like ourselves, reject and condemn the principle, Pascal's contention is as just as it is forcible ”

“ Humble yourself, impotent reason : be silent, imbecile nature; understand that man is infinitely beyond man, and learn from your Master what your true condition is. Listen
to God 1*
It is Revelation, then, which alone furnishes the word of the onig ma, and brings the whole mystery into light. In Christianity a voice from God reaches the heart, and is felt to be true. Not, indeed, every heart—for all conviction of religious truth, all finding of God, depends on the bias of the disposition—but the heart which is disengaged from the passions and is thus prepared for the truth ”

“ Pascal had looked with too piercing and unshrinking a gaze into the mysterious depths of human nature, not to feel what a terrible strength there is in the Pyrrhonist or, as we say now, agnostic position, when encountered by bare reason, to which the heart brings no reinforcement. ”

“ It is upon such of these intuitions as are of a moral or spiritual character that religion is founded; its truth must be felt, but cannot be strictly demonstrated; here, to use Neander"s phrase, the over-curious logical temper must be subordinated to the living intuition. Is it too much to say that, if this great principle had been better understood by Pascal's" successors in the defence of religion against sceptics, we should have been spared much bad logic, and Christianity have suffered much less damage at the hands of its friends? ”

“ Cyran by the entire group of Port-Royalists, and clung to by them through all their persecutions as being of the very essence of their Christianity, was embraced by Pascal with all the fervour of a soul overpowered by a conviction of the nothingness of man, and the sovereign omnipotence of God ; and, when pushed to its logical consequences, it seems necessarily to reduce man to an irresponsible machine. ”

“ It is as if we were admitted into the sculptor's studio and permitted to watch his movements, as with modelling tool in hand he adds new graces to the figure which is growing into beauty beneath his touch In our own time we imagine the "Little Letters" are not so much read as formerly; many more persons probably know them by name than have any acquaintance with their contents. ”

“ I had always fancied that one sinned the more, the less one thought of God ; but now I see that as soon as one can get Him out of one's head altogether, all goes right for the future. No more half-and-half sinners, who retain a lingering inclination towards virtue; they will all be damned, those sinners by halves. ”

“ But as the feat was at no long interval followed by the treatise on conic sections, which excited the mingled incredulity and astonishment of the veteran Descartes, and that by the construction of an arithmetical machine to assist his father's financial calculations, and that again by the invention of the barometer, we cannot doubt that Pascal was not merely one of those precocious children who are a nine days' wonder, but was endowed by Nature with one of the most extraordinary capacities for mathematical reasoning and physical research that ever fell to the lot of man. ”

“ We rise from our study of him with the sad sense of a life uncompleted, a promise unfulfilled, a glorious possibility but half realized. Yet viewed in the light of Christian hope, there is more to cheer than to depress in this spectacle of mingled weakness and strength. ”

“ Rogers, who writes that Pascal's "just image is that of the youthful athlete of Greece, in whom was seen the perfection of physical beauty and physical strength ;" and that "the French, under the hands of Pascal, assumes forms of beauty by a still and noiseless movement, and as by a sort of enchantment." Such testimonies might easily be multiplied, but it is enough to supplement them with Dr. Tulloch's remark, that "none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed so many of the highest judges of literary form." ”

“ It was their author's fortune to stand at the epoch when French prose was in transition from its early stiffness and uncouth harshness to the transparent perspicacity and flexible grace of its maturity ; the happy epoch, as it has been called, when nature and art were at a just balance and equipoise with each other, and co-operated in the right measure to produce consummate works. ”

“ In vain does philosophy undertake the task; Stoics, Epicureans, Pyrrhonists, all labour to no purpose. "A fine thing," he cries, "to tell a man ignorant of himself to find his own way to God! A fine thing, too, to say the same to a man who has come to know himself !" Reason must be pronounced ineffectual; God cannot be discovered in suns and stars and material organisms; the alleged metaphysical proofs of His existence are too remote and feeble, and " if they have force with a few, it is only for an instant ; the next moment doubt returns." What then remains? ”

“ In dealing with a psychological problem like this it should never be forgotten that in proportion to the depth and thoroughness of the thought will the merely logical basis of knowledge and religion appear, insecure' and inadequate, and the stress be thrown on those deeper but vaguer intuitions which in times of mental conflict and distress are the first to grow dim and to swim before the eyes. ”

“ It does not need to be oneself a keen and enthusiastic editor, to conceive of the eagerness with which M. Faugere turned the pages of these resuscitated treasures, and of the astonishment and delight with which he recognised in them authentic copies of a large part at least of the Pascal papers which had been committed by Marguerite Perier to the care of the Oratorian Fathers at Clermont. ”

“ With Pascal, then, the first step towards faith is taken by bridling in the passions and abasing the heart; and the indispensable basis of intelligent belief is a perception of the congruity of Christianity to the human soul, a conviction of its power to touch the inner life at every point, and give satisfaction to all the higher wants of humanity. ”

“ Pascal did for theology something analogous to what Socrates used to do for philosophy; he recalled it to earth and wished to give it for a solid foundation the facts which are grounded in tho very nature of man. For if those facts be admitted and if Christianity explains them all, and alone can explain them, must not the Christian religion, which thus becomes the key of the moral world and the last word of human nature, be indeed the true religion? ”

“ All our knowledge, Pascal would say, rests on primary, instinctive beliefs or intuitions, which are felt to be true, but are incapable of demonstration, and on these all the logical processes of the intellect must ultimately be based. ”

“ And again, "the man in Pascal does not resign himself to the scepticism of the philosopher; his reason cannot believe, but his heart needs to believe." To the heartrending scepticism which he thus discovers in the authentic "Thoughts" M. Cousin attributes the extraordinary mutilation which they underwent at the hands of his editors. "There escape from Pascal, in the midst of the fits of his convulsive devotion, cries of misery and despair which neither Port-Royal, nor Desmolets, nor Bossut have dared to repeat." ”

“ But after deducting everything that can be thus explained, there remains a laige body of fragments which are as deeply tinctured with scepticism as anything in Montaigne. No one whose soul had not been swept over by the storms of doubt could have penned the famous wager-essay, in which it has been said that Pascal plays at pitch and toss with the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
"Either there is a God. or there is not," he says; "to which side shall we incline? Reason can give us no assistance, yet we must take one side or the other; we must stake ou the question. ”

“ Jesuitism may be bad, and the Jesuit morality exposed by Pascal abominable, but the one and the other are the natural outgrowth of a Church which had become a mechanism for the regulation of human conduct, rather than a spiritual power addressing freely the human heart and conscience. ”

“ For him the overwhelming certainty of religion arose out of its deep and manifold correspondence with what he knew of himself and man, with what conscience told him of the moral law, and the world showed him of degradation and sin. ”

“ The Jesuit system of morality was the growth of the Jesuit principle of accommodation, added on to the Roman principle of authority. Looking at morality entirely from without, as an artificial mo'le of regulating life and society for the supreme good of the Church, the Jesuit casuists were driven, under the necessities o.f such a system, from point to point, till all essential moral distinction was lost in the mechanical manipulations of their schools. . - . In the pages of Pascal the Jesuits too obviously made a deplorable business both of religion and morality. ”

“ It is reported of Bossuet by Voltaire, in his "Age of Louis XIV.," that when asked what book next to his own he would like best to have written, he replied, "The 'Provincial Letters.'" Voltaire's own admiration of their literary qualities is freely expressed by him in the same work, where he pronounces them to have been "the first work of genius in prose," and affirms that "the best comedies of Moliere have not more wit than the earlier ones, nor has Bossuet anything more sublime than the later ones." ”

“ For if even amidst the shadows of mortality and under the burden of premature decay, man can be so great, of what height may he not be capable when the burden is unbound from his shoulders and mortality is swallowed up of life? ”