SOURCE: An introduction to Thoughts on Religion and Philosophy, by Blaise Pascal, translated by Isaac Taylor, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1894, pp. iii-lx.

Those periodic agitations to which all social systems, whether civil or religious, are liable, carry with them a twofold and opposite influence; the one, and the most direct, tending to give rise to similar movements in neighbouring communities; and the other, operating with hardly less force, to preclude any such convulsions where else they probably would, or certainly must, have taken place. By the very same spectacle of public commotions, minds of a certain class are animated to action, and hurried into the midst of perils; while others are as effectively deterred from giving scope to their rising energies. In this way every revolution which history records may be reckoned at once to have caused, and to have prevented kindred changes.

In no instance has this sort of double influence made itself more apparent than in that of the religious revolution which shook the European system in the sixteenth century; and after having watched the progress of the ecclesiastical renovation of northern Europe, as it spread from land to land, an inquiry, fraught with instruction, might be instituted, concerning that reaction of jealousy, terror, and pious caution, which, affecting many of the eminent minds of southern Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, smothered those elements of faith and right reason, that, again and again, seemed to be indicating approaching and happy movements.

In Italy, in Austria, in Spain, in France, it was not merely that the dread of reform incited the ecclesiastical and secular authorities to a renewed vigilance, and induced them to have recourse to severities, such as might crush, at the instant, every beginning of change; but much more it was the vague dread of heresy, it was the horror inspired by the mere names of the Reformers, that broke the energy of the very men who, had they been left to the impulse of their own convictions, would, perhaps, themselves, have dared the vengeance of the church, and have led on a reformation….

The writings of Pascal, as well the Thoughts as the Provincial Letters, indicate, on almost every page, this latent and indirect influence of the horror of heresy, swaying his mind. The reader, as well in justice to the fame of this great man, as for his own satisfaction, needs to be reminded of the fact now adverted to: and if at any moment he be perplexed by the difficulty of reconciling Pascal's abject and superstitious Romanism with the vigour and clearness of his understanding, and with the simplicity of his piety, he may remember that, beside other causes, not necessary here to specify, this eminent man was well aware that, to give the least indulgence to the impulses of mere reason on certain points of his belief, would involve nothing less than his passing at a leap, or his being forced across the awful gulph that yawned between the paradise of the church, and the gehenna of heresy. A mind like that of Pascal, although it might, in any particular direction, forbid itself to think at all, could never have stayed its own course, midway, had it once started. [A solitary expression, pregnant with meaning, occurs among the Thoughts, which should be here pointed out, as indicating Pascal's latent dissatisfaction with the system which he thought it necessary to uphold. So little does the sentiment contained in this passage accord with the general strain of the author's writings, that one is almost inclined to suppose it must have been, as in some other instances is clearly the case, a mere memorandum of an opinion upon which he intended to animadvert.—Il faut avoir une pensée de derière, et juger du tout par-là: en parlant cepeudant comme le peuple. The full import of this sentence is suggested rather more clearly in the author's own words than in the English; the translator having given the terms an admissible and softened rendering, more in accordance with Pascal's known simplicity and sincerity. Art. cix. p. 198.] And yet it was by submitting to these restraints that he exposed himself to the keen taunts of Voltaire and Condorcet; and it is these bitter sarcasms, read by all the world, that have operated to destroy, almost entirely, the influence he must otherwise have exerted over the minds of his admiring countrymen. What might not have been the issue, for France, had Pascal and his friends held a higher course? But, stooping as they did, before the power that aided the Jesuit in trampling on the Jansenist, they left the field open to the Encyclopedists, who, in the next age, schooled the French people in those lessons of atheism that were to take effect amid the horrors of the revolution.

Putting out of view so much superstition or asceticism as belonged to Pascal's infirm bodily temperament, rather than to his principles as a Romanist, and setting off also, here and there, a phrase in which he does homage to the Romish Church, he may fairly be accounted as one of ourselves—substantially, a protestant: and such in fact he was by his opposition to the spirit and corruptions of that church, as embodied in the society of Jesuits; as well as generally by the position he occupied in common with his friends, as obnoxious to the papacy. Protestants may very properly think of him rather as placed on the same radius with themselves, than as moving in another orbit.

In most instances, when any language meets the reader which reminds him painfully of the writer's enthralment to Rome, the incidental phrase, or the corollary in argument, instead of its standing inseparably connected with the context, as it would have done, had the writer been himself a better papist, hangs loose, and might even be removed without leaving any perceptible hiatus;—nay, such excisions (although not in fact justifiable on the part of an editor or translator) would be like the absorption of flaws from an otherwise spotless surface of marble. On this ground Pascal appears to much advantage when compared with Fenelon, who, although not his inferior in purity and elevation of spirit, had been carried much father from the simplicity of the Christian system by the specious mysticism that has beguiled so many eminent men of the Romish communion. Pascal is no mystic:—his vigorous good sense, although it did not exempt him from some trivial superstitions in his personal conduct, held him back on the brink of that dim gulph wherein secluded speculatists, of every age, have so often been lost. It is thus sometimes that a strong man, who would instantly burst a rope wherewith any might attempt to confine him, yet quietly suffers himself to be held down by a thread. Pascal's French editors, who jeer at his bodily mortifications and his frivolous observances, had not sufficient acquaintance with the history of religion to be conscious of the proof he gave of a substantial force of mind in keeping himself clear of the sophistical pietism by which, on all sides, he was surrounded.

The Thoughts of Pascal should never be read without a knowledge of the circumstances that attended their production…. In how few instances would an author's loose private notes, and the undigested materials out of which he had designed to construct what might be intelligible to others, present so much appearance of consistency and order, as, in fact, belong to this collection. Whatever abruptness there may seem in many of the transitions, nevertheless a real and ascertainable unity of purpose pervades the whole. This one purpose, manifestly governing the writer's mind at all times, appears even in those of the Thoughts that relate immediately to the mathematics, or to other secular subjects; for it is evident that Pascal was constantly intent upon the great business of establishing sacred truths; and, that, with this view, he laboured so to lay down the principles of reasoning in geometry, or in the physical sciences, as should secure an advantage, more or less direct, for the evidences of Christianity.

It should be said that the confusion in which Pascal's papers were found after his death, and which belonged also to the earlier editions of the Thoughts, has been, in great measure, remedied by later editors; and especially by Condorcet, who, little as he relished the principles or the argument of his distinguished countryman, applied to the best purpose, his own eminently perspicacious mind, in disentangling the disordered mass, and in reducing it to some logical consistency. Bossut, adopting, in the main Condorcet's classification, brought it to a higher perfection, and thus, by the labours of these two competent men, the modern reader foregoes, perhaps, but little of the benefit he might have derived from the author's own cares in preparing his thoughts for the public eye. [In some instances, the contrarieties of opinion, between one paragraph and the next, was such, and so alternate, as to make it certain that the author had intended to throw his materials into the form of a dialogue, between a sceptic and himself; and his editors have in some cases, as in chap vii. of the present translation, actually completed what was clearly Pascal's meaning. Unless understood as a dialogue, the whole would be contradictory and unintelligible. It is probable that, in some other places, where the indication is less manifest, a similar distribution of the Thoughts was in the author's mind when he committed them to writing.]

Leaving the Thoughts in the order to which they have so well been reduced, we shall find a convenience in assuming, for a while, a rather different principle of arrangement, as the ground of the remarks that are to occupy this introductory essay.

With this view, then, we may consider the Thoughts as bearing upon—

I. Abstract Philosophy, and the general principles of reasoning.

II. Ethics; and more especially, the Pathology of Human Nature.

III. Devotional Sentiment.

IV. Christian Theology.

V. The argument in behalf, of Religion against Atheists, and of Christianity against Infidels, to which are appended incidental apologies—for Romanism, and for Jansenism; or for the Port Royal party.

In the first place, then, (nor need the merely religious reader think this branch of the subject of no interest to him) something demands to be said of that portion of Pascal's Thoughts which relates to Abstract Philosophy, and to the general principles of reasoning.

It does not appear that Pascal had become acquainted with the writings of Lord Bacon, which even so long as forty years after their first publication, had not so commanded the attention of the philosophic world in England or abroad, as to ensure their having been read by all who themselves pretended to take rank among philosophers. His scientific writings, however, afford unquestionable indications of the fact that, along with the great minds of the age, be deeply resented the antiquated tyranny of the pseudo-science, and of the jargon logic which so long had shackled the European intellect. "The true philosophy," says he "is to scout philosophy:" nor was this uttered with a cynical feeling, or in affectation; for in other places he deliberately declares his contempt, both of the Aristotelian logic, and of the method of prosecuting physical inquires, then commonly practised. But although he himself, as in the signal instance of the barometrical experiment, followed as if by instinct, the methods of modern science, (or rather anticipated those methods) and although in the admirable article on "authority in matters of philosophy," he convincingly shows the error of the antiquated system, and points out a better path, yet it does not appear that he had, like Bacon, so digested his notions as to be able to announce a new and hopeful physical logic. On the contrary, his tone in reference to natural philosophy is, altogether, desponding, and he seems so little to have foreseen the happy issue of the revolution which was then actually in its commencement, that he turns towards the mathematics as the only ground on which the (ground of pure faith excepted) any fixed principles, or absolute truth could be met with.

"Every body asks for the means of avoiding error; and the professors of logic pretend to show us the way: but, in fact, the geometrician (mathematician) is the only man who reaches it. Beyond the range of this science, and of what closely follows it, there are no real demonstrations."

This is now true only in a very limited sense; and had Pascal lived to witness, and to take the lead in (as he would had he lived) the conquests of modern science, he would have granted that there are conclusions, not mathematical, which it would be most absurd to speak of as at all less certain than this—that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. It can no longer be admitted, except in a loose and rhetorical style, that, "The sciences touch, at their two extremes—the absolute ignorance of the vulgar, and the conscious ignorance of the greatest and most accomplished minds; who, having learned all that man may know, have found that they know nothing; and who feel themselves to have come home just to that point of universal ignorance whence they started." This mode of speaking, which we still allow the moralists or preacher to use, who vaguely compares the circle of human science, with the infinite and absolute omniscience of the Eternal mind, has actually no meaning, if now applied to any one branch of philosophy, as compared with another. "What does man know?" exclaims the pensive moralist; and we leave him to reply—"nothing." But if the geometrician were to start up, among his fellows, in the fields of reason, and say "I alone know any thing:—all your pretended sciences are no better than the illusive mists that torment the thirsty traveller on a sandy wilderness:"—we then join issue with this exclusionist; and are prepared to affirm, in behalf of a good portion of all the modern sciences, that they are not a whit less substantial, or less certain, than geometry itself. Pascal, could we now challenge him, would grant as much as this, and would therefore rescind some six or eight of his Thoughts.

Mischief arises, in many instances, and especially some damage accrues to the argument in support of Christianity, from the error of confounding the abstract certainty or the directness of this or that method of proof, with the certainty of particular propositions, or facts. It would be well if all obscurity were removed from about this very necessary distinction.—Let it be remembered then, that the demonstrations of geometry are, as every one knows, regular, definite, and infallible: while on the other hand, the evidence of testimony is (to speak of it abstractedly) often circuitous, and liable to be fallacious. Be it so; and yet, in fact, there are ten thousand instances in which, not merely is it wise and safe to accept of testimony, as the best sort of proof, under the circumstances, which we can obtain; but in which it would be nothing else but sheer folly to speak of facts, so established, as in any degree less certain than are the propositions of Euclid. If seven hundred or seven thousand inhabitants of a town affirm that, last week, or last year, or ten years ago, their market house was burnt down, are we free, sagely to withhold our belief—to shrug the shoulders, and to say—"What you allege may be all very true; but, pardon me, human testimony falls so very far short of mathematical demonstration, that I cannot admit the fact you speak of to be fully established." And what holds good in a comparison of testimony with mathematical proof, holds good also in regard to the physical sciences. The deductions of chemistry, for example, many of them, and even where they involve no mathematical induction, claim to be spoken of as indubitably certain: and so in other departments of philosophy; nor can it be esteemed anything but a foolish and pedantic exaggeration to repeat now, what, in Pascal's time there yet seemed ground to say, namely that—"Out of geometry, man knows nothing." There is indeed a class of persons who, for the sinister purpose of throwing a cloud over the evidence of Christianity, will consent to compromise even the best portions of human knowledge;—the mathematics only excepted. Such persons, knowing well that men will continue to act upon the presumption that the physical sciences are certain, are quite content so long as the sceptical inference of their doctrine is left to attach alone to religion: Pascal himself would have drawn an opposite practical inference from his premises, and have said—"Christianity demands your submission because its truth is as well established as that of the physical sciences, on the certainty of which you every day stake your interests, and venture your lives. But we, and especially in the present state of philosophy, are free to deal in another, and a more strenuous manner with pedantic scepticism, and to say—Many things are certainly true, besides the propositions of geometry; and among such certainties, are all the principal points of history; and among these, pre-eminently, the facts of the gospel history.

Assuming what we consider as probable, if not absolutely certain, that Pascal had not met with the Novum Organum, or the De Argumentis, it is curious to observe the similarity, or even identity of sentiment, and sometimes of language, which may be traced in those passages where the one and the other speak of the then-existing and ancient philosophy. The scientific reader may with advantage, compare the thoughts referred to in the margin [The reader is referred to the entire chapter, (xxvi), on authority in matters of Philosophy; as well as to the next on Geometry, and to that on the Art of Convincing.] with the preface to the Novum Organum, and with the introductory axioms of the first book. A remarkable coincidence, both of principle and of expression, occurs in the passages in which these two great men state the relative claims of reason and of authority, or of antiquity, as bearing respectively upon the physical sciences, and upon theology: [Compare Pascal's Thoughts on Authority, with cap. i. lib. ix, of the De Argumentis, where a remarkable coincidence of thought and expression presents itself. Also aph. 61 and 89, Nov. Organum.] nor can we doubt that, had Pascal lived longer, and directed the main force of his mind to philosophy he would have accelerated its advance, in his own country, at least: and starting forward from the ground where Descartes moved only in a vortex, and where Leibnitz wandered over the wastes of metaphysics, would have opened the road of genuine science;—nay, not improbably he might have snatched from England the glory of a portion of Newton's discoveries.

By no means to be compared with Bacon for grasp of mind, or for richness, versatility, or boundless faculty of invention, Pascal had more of that caution, justness of intellect, and mathematical simplicity, which belonged to Newton; nor did he want, intellectually at least, that high and true independence, and that strong good sense, which impelled the one and the other to break away from the entanglements of the old philosophy. Considering however, his entire constitution, the animal and moral, as well as the intellectual, we may the less regret his having been so soon diverted from scientific pursuits. The reformer, whether in the civil, the ecclesiastical, or the scientific world, should not be merely one of lofty stature in mind, but of a robust moral confirmation. In every age, no doubt, there are minds (accomplishing their course in obscurity) that divine the changes which are to be effected in a future age; but in part the animal force, and in part the opportunity, are wanting to them which are requisite for effectively agitating the inert elements around them. The progress of man has been so slow, not so much because nature generates so few great minds in each age, as because a rare combination of intellectual faculties, of moral qualities, of animal forces, and of external means, are required for enabling any individual to give effect to those improvements which, more than a few in every age, could theoretically have anticipated.

No modern philosophical writer has better than Pascal, marked out the ground occupied by the sciences, and which lies as a middle region between, on the one hand, those elementary principles which are always to be taken for granted, and to be considered as certain, although not capable of being defined or proved;—and, on the other hand—the illimitable space, filled with what is unknown and perhaps inscrutable, but toward which, though never to pervade it, the sciences are continually making incursions, and pushing out their boundaries. Nevertheless the principle of reasoning which he lays down, as universally applicable and sufficient, and which he affirms to be fully carried out in Geometry, namely, to define whatever admits of definition; that is to say everything except our elementary notions; and to prove everything which may be questioned, and which is not self-evident, has in fact only a limited range. This axiom of reasoning, or logical law, applicable as it may be to whatever is purely abstract, can subserve no practical purpose or only a very limited one, if brought to bear upon the physical sciences. Pascal cannot be thought to have furnished us with the elements of Physical Logic, which still remain to be fully ascertained, and well digested.

To take an example;—what progress could he himself have made in determining the question relative to the alleged weight of the atmosphere, and which he so triumphantly brought to a conclusion by the mere aid of the rules he proposes for deciding between truth and error? We may boldly say, none at all. It is at this point, where heretofore philosophers had come to a stand, that Bacon steps in, and opens wide the path to genuine knowledge, by showing that the methods of abstract science, wherein all the entities to be spoken of are creatures of the mind, and therefore fully comprehended and embraced by it—that these methods are totally inapplicable to the physical sciences, in relation to which, "man knows absolutely nothing beyond what he may actually have observed." Whether there is in nature, or whether they may be, a perfect vacuum, is a question in deciding which, neither the logic of geometry, nor the logic of metaphysics, can afford us the least assistance: a question like this, involves a knowledge of the most occult properties of matter; and in fact it is a question concerning which, even modern science, is not yet in a position to pronounce with confidence. We well know indeed that it is possible and that it is very easy to exclude, from a certain space, all ponderable or tangible bodies; and we moreover know that the rise of fluids in an exhausted tube is caused by no such "horror of a vacuum," as had been attributed to nature; and that it is as simple a phenomenon as the rise of the scale out of which we have removed the weight that had held the beam in equilibrio. But the fact of a real and absolute vacuum is still a mystery.

There are few portions of the Thoughts, if any, that seem to have been more deliberately digested, or that are in fact better condensed, than the entire article "on the Art of Persuasion," [The translator cannot be blamed for rendering—De l' Art de Persuader "on the Art of Persuasion," and yet what Pascal really insists upon in this chapter is not the art of persuasion, of which he professes himself no master; but it is the art of convincing, or of conducting a purely rational process to a peremptory conclusion.] or what might be termed—the Elements of a true Logic. Pascal, having distinguished between, on the one hand, the methods, various as they may be, which are proper for influencing the minds of men, with all their predilections and personal inclinations, and for bringing them to some given point; and on the other hand, the process of severe reasoning, irrespectively of the condition of the mind to which an argument is addressed; and after professing his inability to offer any system of rules available for the former purpose, proceeds to state the rudiments of the latter method, and which, as stated by him, are substantially those of geometrical demonstration.

"This art, which I call the art of persuasion, and which, properly, is nothing but the management of such proofs as are regular and perfect, consists of three essential parts namely—1. To expound the terms which we intend to employ, by clear definitions;—2. To propound principles or axioms, such as are in themselves evident, for the purpose of establishing the points in question:—3. and then, always to substitute mentally, in the demonstrations, the definitions, in the place of the things defined." "In adhering to this method," says our author, "we can never fail to produce conviction:" and this may be granted so long as the method itself is applied to those cases only to which it properly attaches. Errors incalculable, and much more than half the logical verbiage, metaphysical, ethical, political, and theological, that encumbers our shelves, has sprung from the practical mistake of forcing the abstract method of reasoning upon subjects that are beyond its range:—that is to say which are in whole, or in part, physical. Now it would be easy to show that, while Pascal rejects with scorn the jargon of the Barbara et Baralipton, his own sovereign method is really reducible to the conditions of the syllogistic process:—the substance is the same; the phrasology only being different; for we have but to put in the place of his "self-evident axiom," or principle, the major term of a syllogism; and in the place of the definition, in any particular instance, the minot, and then the "mental substitution" which he speaks of, will stand for the middle term, and involve the conclusion.

In all cases in which the notions, or the things to which a process of reasoning relates, are the creations of the human mind, or are, in some other way, thoroughly understood, in their inmost constitution, as, for example, in the several branches of the pure mathematics—in all such cases, what is required in establishing a particular proposition is nothing but to exhibit the relation which a certain quantity or quality bears to some other known quantity or quality. Mathematical reasoning is only the showing forth, or unfolding, of relations: and the same may be said of all reasoning which is purely, abstract, or metaphysical. In no such process of reasoning, if scientifically conducted, are we liable to err by ignorance of the things spoken of; for these things are notions which the mind penetrates and grasps in the most absolute manner.

But now let it be supposed that some one or more of the things to be defined is an entity, known to the human mind through the senses only, and known in some few of its properties only, or known merely by a limited evidence of testimony; what then becomes of Pascal's "sovereign and infallible method of proof?" it is altogether unavailing. We thoroughly know what we mean by an elliptic curve, generated in such or such a manner; and we may reason concerning its properties with the most entire assurance. But, in the place of a certain curve, abstractedly considered, let it be imagined that we are presuming to predict, irrespectively of experiment, what will be the curve formed by a stream of water, issuing from an aperture in a vessel. In this, as in any similar instance, we find, or soon shall find, that we are "reckoning without our host;" or, in other words, that, in relation to whatever is physical there are occult causes at work, all of which must be thoroughly known, before our abstract methods of reasoning can take effect: In physical inquiries, of whatever kind they may be, a vast deal is to be done before we ought to think ourselves in a position, either to define our terms, or to propound our axioms:—so much, in truth, have we to do, that, what remains to be done after this preliminary work has been effected, is a mere form—a verbal winding up, which demands no rules nor any peculiar skill. What pedantry can be more impertinent than that of bringing in the solemnities of the syllogism after a course of experiments has so far laid open the constitution of bodies, or their mode of operation one upon another, as that we may safely deduce some general principles concerning them?

All this is now well understood within the circle of the modern physical sciences; and Pascal, had he lived to witness, and to take a part in, what has been effected since his time, would himself have been among the foremost to put in practice modes of reasoning altogether differing from that which he here advances as the one and the only method.

But owing to the indistinctness and imperfection of our notions on subjects connected with morals, religion, and the philosophy of the human mind, and to the vagueness of language, as related to these subjects, the very important distinction between what is purely abstract, and what is physical, does not here force itself upon our notice, [Bacon in innumerable places of his writings, insists upon the distinction here adverted to, and loudly claims the Philosophy of the mind as belonging to Physics. Universes illæ (the faculties of the mind) circa quas versartur Scientiæ Logicæ, et Ethicæ; sed in doctrina de anima origines ipsarum tractari debent, idque physice. De Aug. Lib. iv, cap. 3. And see particularly the 82d axiom of the Novum Organum, on the inutility of the existing Logic as applied to Physics.] nor, in fact, has it hitherto been much regarded or clearly understood. Hence it has happened that in treating questions of mental and moral philosophy, and of theology too, the logic of abstract science has been applied to subjects that are either of a mixed kind, or are perhaps altogether physical. The consequence has been that whatever is the most absurd, and whatever calumniates the Divine nature, or human nature, has been made to appear indubitable, by some process of syllogism. False theories, and errors of reasoning, in relation to the motions of solids and fluids, or to the chemical properties of bodies, are sure after a little while, to meet their refutation by an appeal to facts and experiments; and in such cases we use no ceremony in discarding the logic which has been found to have led us astray. It is otherwise in ethics and theology, wherein errors of a kind to impair the most momentous practical principles, may long maintain themselves, behind the thorny hedges of metaphysical logic. The cessation, in our own times, of theological controversy, and the dead silence that, for some years past, has prevailed within the circle of polemics, may be attributed, as well to other incidental causes, as to a latent feeling that those methods of scholastic disputation which have not as yet been renounced, would, if again put in activity, bring back modes of thinking and opinions, that have been silently consigned to oblivion by the spread of scriptural notions, and by the good sense and better feelings of our times; and especially by the indirect influence of the spirit of Christian zeal and benevolence.

It seemed a proper part of this Introductory Essay to premise a caution concerning that portion of Pascal's Thoughts to which, it is manifest, he himself attached a peculiar value; and which perhaps he would have singled out as the most important of them all. Be it remembered then, that, while Pascal's axioms of logic are perfectly sound, when brought to bear upon subjects that already lie wholly within the grasp of the human mind, they can serve us not at all when we approach ground where our knowledge is confessedly partial, and all our notions dim or unfixed. And this assuredly must be admitted in relation to whatever concerns either the Divine Nature, or the constitution of human nature, or the conditions of the unseen world:—on these grounds we may account ourselves qualified to construct syllogisms then, when we have so enlarged our acquaintance with the subjects in question as to be able to define our terms, and to state, without fear of contradiction, our self-evident axioms.

II. We have next to consider Pascal's Thoughts as embodying his notions of Ethics, and, more especially, as exhibiting the views he took of the actual condition of human nature, and of its pathology.

It is in the inimitable Provincial Letters, rather than in this collection of his Thoughts, that Pascal appears to advantage as the firm, acute, and Christian-like moralist. In truth that invigorating excitement at the impulse of which those letters were produced, elevated the writer above himself; or rather, we should say, this extraordinary motive raised him, for a while, to his own real level, beneath which he was too often depressed by the weight of his many bodily infirmities. Not a few of his Thoughts, and especially those which convey his no tions of human life, are impressions of the mind of Pascal—the valetudinarian, the sufferer, the cœlebs, and the recluse: but when thoroughly roused to come forth as the champion of religion, of morality, and of an oppressed society, he then appears in his proper strength—the strength of his unmatched intellect:—the feeble frame and shattered nerves of the writer have no part in the Provincial Letters.

And yet we must acknowledge that, as the antomist of the human heart, and as the keen analyst of its springs of action, the very infirmities of Pascal's animal temperament yielded him an aid. There is, as we well know, a flush and force of full health which is rarely if ever combined with any nice discrimination of character, or with a piercing discernment of the evanescent differences that distinguish man from man. The robust and the happy (the physically happy) are themselves in too much movement to allow of that tranquil subsidence of the thoughts—that refluence of the tide of life, which favours an exact acquaintance with what is latent in human nature. It is not the merry voyagers, who are gaily careering, by favour of wind and tide, upon the sea of life—it is not these that know much of the pebbly bottom, or of the deep grottoes, or gloomy caverns beneath. But Pascal had much to do with the ebbings of animal life; and thus he became familiar with those searching trains of thought that attend superior minds in season of extreme physical depression or exhaustion. When the pulse of life is slow and feeble, the spirit seems to be able to take a nicer hold of minute objects, and to exercise more delicate powers of perception.

Few writers, and perhaps none but the one—his countryman and contemporary, with whom we shall presently find occasion to compare him, have dissected the human heart with a nicer hand than Pascal. His qualification for these difficult intellectual operations appears to have resulted from an uncommon combination of the analytic faculty, proper to the geometrician, with an exquisite moral sense, more often possessed, in this eminent degree, by woman than by man; and very rarely associated with the scientific faculty. Another instance of the sort does not occur to us. He has himself described these two opposite endowments, [Pascal varies a little his phrases in designating these two orders of mind, calling them respectively l'esprit de justesse, and l'esprit de geometrie. The one is force et droiture d'esprit, and the other l'étendue. Again the opposite of l'esprit de geometrie, he names l'esprit de finesse—and what he means is something which, in Scotland, has been called gumption.] and has spoken of them as seldom if ever possessed by the same individual. What he intends in the passage here referred to is, on the one hand, the mathematical power which holds in its grasp a number of principles, with a constant recollection of their various inter-relations, and remote consequences; and on the other, the acute, intuitive perception of minute differences among things which, to common eyes, are undistinguishable; and he affirms that this power and habit of instantaneous discrimination indisposes a mind, so endowed, to give attention to formal methods of proof; while the mathematician, on his part, pays as little respect to perceptions the accuracy of which cannot be methodically proved.

Pascal himself, although he claims no such rare combination of endowments, was at once a proficient in the severest habits of thought, and accustomed to carry the analytic process to its ultimate point; while yet he possessed a penetrating intuition in relation to the commingled elements of our moral nature. So it was that, while mathematical minds, generally, view with contempt, or entirely overlook, whatever cannot be strictly defined, he although pre-eminently mathematical, pursued with as sedulous a curiosity, the occult movements of the human heart, as he did the complex properties of the cycloid.

Certain portions of [Pascal's] Thoughts can hardly fail to suggest a comparison of Pascal with Rochefoucauld, his celebrated contemporary; and this involuntary comparison between the religious and the non-religious anatomist of the human heart, brings with it some curious reflections. These two eminent writers were alike remarkable for a justness and perspicacity of understanding which imparted an admirable simplicity and propriety to their style. Both had a great share in fixing the usage of their native language, and in imparting to it that elegance and precision, as well as that thorough transparency, which has become the characteristic and the charm of French philosophical literature. Both, moreover, in their habits of thought, give evidence of their having breathed the atmosphere of a court, where in a peculiar degree, every thing was artificial and false; for although Pascal stood many degrees more remote than the gay Rochefoucauld from the circle of corruption, his rank in society, and his connections, placed him in a position where the court and its manners, were always within his view. With the one therefore, as well as with the other, it is not MAN, who is thought of and described; but the artificial men and women of the French court; and inasmuch as these sophisticated personages were, in an extraordinary degree, cased in the extrinsic and illusory recommendations of rank and luxury—swaddled, like mummies, in perfumed and painted rottenness; and as they needed a great deal of unwinding, before the real dimensions and merits of the character could be ascertained, so both these searching spirits acquired a peculiar readiness in performing this stripping operation: when once they set about denuding human nature, they bared it to the very bones.

Those ethical writers whose happy lot it has been to become conversant only, or chiefly, with societies in an unsophisticated state, have usually allowed every thing to pass as really fair and good, which seemed to be so; nor have they often reached any nice discriminations of character. But, on the contrary, those who, like the two writers now spoken of, and others who occupy a similar place in French literature, have known much of the worst specimens of human nature, have lost almost, or altogether, the power of believing any thing at all to be genuine; and have carried the practice of analysis to a point which in reference to human nature, involves an absolute and universal scepticism, and a cheerless contempt of mankind at large.

Rochefoucauld, although himself an amiable man, actually reached this extreme;—and the issue, we have in the "Maxims and Moral Reflections." Pascal was saved from it by his religious sentiments, and by his constant recognition of the original excellence of human nature, and of the immortal dignity opened to man in the Christian system. The one looked no farther than to the degenerate specimens of humanity before him; the other compared these same specimens with an ideal form of absolute moral beauty and perfection. The one views, with cold derision, what the other weeps over. The courtier, in the prospect of wide-spread corruption, indulges his curiosity, undisturbed either by hope or fear:—but the Christian philosopher gazes upon the same field of death, not with unmixed dismay, but with a breathless expectation, waiting until the Spirit from on high shall, in the appointed season, return to reanimate these ghastly forms!

If Rochefoucauld betrays any sort of uneasiness, it is simply that impatience to unmask pretension, and to get every thing valued at its price, and at nothing more, which usually attaches to those who are gifted (or afflicted) with more penetration than their neighbours.—If only every thing can be brought down to its true dimension, if, whatever has hitherto appeared, and is generally accounted noble, can henceforward be thought of as common, or sordid; if only the professors of virtue and honesty can be brought to confess themselves false; if all this can be done, and when whatever has stood high, has been well trodden in the mire, then Rochefoucauld will be content: he has no aspirations, no struggling of a better nature to wrankle in his heart. Not so Pascal, who, himself keenly alive to excellence, mourns to see so many dead to it. This contrast between minds, in some respects, of so analogous a conformation, offers a specimen, the most complete, of two classes of men—the one knowing human nature to consent to it, as it is:—the other, knowing it to sigh and to blush for it, and to attempt its restoration.

A few instances of similarity and of contrast, gathered from the Thoughts, and from the Maxims, may not improperly be adduced to illustrate the comparison we have here instituted, and which is in itself of some significance. In certain passages, as in the one first to be quoted, Pascal seems to have lost hold of that redeeming element which usually distinguishes him from his contemporary, and allows himself to employ the language of exaggeration (against which the reader of the Thoughts need be on his guard, as the occasional fault of our author's manner). "Human life is illusion perpetual, and nothing else. All that is passing in the world is a process of deceiving and flattering, one the other. Nobody ever speaks of us to our face, as they speak behind our back. There is no other bond of union among men than this system of mutual deception. Very few friendships would subsist if every one knew what his friend said of him in his absence; although it is there that he speaks sincerely, and dispassionately. Man therefore is nothing but pretence, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself, and in relation to others; and all these dispositions, so remote from justice and reason, spring naturally from his heart."

How comes there, we may ask, to be any counterfeiting of that which, in fact, has no existence at all? If there really be no sincerity or honesty in the world, what does the word hypocrisy mean? How is it that mankind have contrived to form to themselves the notions of falseness, deception, guile, if they have had no means of conceiving of the opposite qualities? If indeed all men were liars, would the very designation—liar, ever have been thought of? Had our author never read the Psalmist's confession of his own unwarrantable precipitancy, who had said, "in his haste"—in a fit of splenetic irritation—"all men are liars"? Dismal exaggerations of this sort, although they confute themselves, nevertheless are of very ill consequences, on every side:—They confirm the debauched in their favourite doctrine—That none are better than themselves; and that all virtue is mere pretence;—they dishearten the upright; and they tend to render the presumptuous and pharasaic, who are conscious of some principle, still more arrogant—each thinking himself a phoenix, and believing that truth and goodness will die with him. Let a Rochefoucauld talk in this style; but alas that a Pascal should echo any such cavernous sounds! Ethical and theological overstatements, like bales of heavy goods piled upon deck, make the vessel of religion lurch dangerously, when the wind blows; and many have made shipwreck of faith and virtue in this very way.

Rochefoucauld says as much, in his own manner, as Pascal; but then he gives his dismal report a smart and pleasant turn; and this sparkling of his language serves to moderate what, if nakedly said, must shock our best feelings; as for instance—"How extensive soever may be the discoveries we have made in the country of self-love (or selfishness) there always remains beyond, unknown lands enough,"—which means, in the writer's dialect, that self-love stretches in fact, over the entire surface of human nature:—but then the noisome assertion is politely phrased. In the same spirit this subtle writer, instead of terrifying the reader by too much at once, creeps on, splitting open the virtues, one by one—honesty, chastity, moderation, beneficence, constancy, courage, friendship, and showing you that not one of them contains a kernel, or is any thing more than a husk of selfishness. Such are the maxims of Rochefoucald; various in apparent meaning; but constant and uniform in the one point of proving that there is no virtue in the world, and that hypocrisy apart, all men are absolutely on a level, all equally unprincipled, insincere, selfish, base. But this is said piecemeal of the virtues and vices; not bluntly and roundly, as thus:—

"Pride is the same in all men; nor is there any other difference than that which results from the variety of means resorted to for its indulgence, and the modes of displaying it."

"Sincerity is an opening of the heart, met with in very few and that which one commonly sees is only a refined dissimulation, intended to excite the confidence of others."

"The hatred of falsehood is often only a latent ambition to render our testimony much set by, and to get a religious reverence attached to our words."

"What is true of ghosts, is true of real love—every body talks of both; but very few people have actually seen either."

"What mankind have called friendship, is only a convention, a reciprocal adjustment of interests, an exchange of good offices; in a word, it is only a traffic in which selfishness always goes into the market, in search of gain."

"However rare true love may be, true friendship is yet more rare." [Maximes et Réflexions Morales. How marvellously do philosophers overlook the simplest facts, when intent upon some process of refined analysis! Thus we are told that the emotion which expresses itself in laughter, involves always a feeling of contempt toward the object that immediately excites it, and a comfortable selfgratulation, arising from a secret reference to one's own superiority. Be it so. But an infant of twelve or fifteen months bursts into loud and ecstatic laughter in beholding pussy's freaks and capers, in play with a cork and a string. It might have been thought that here was an instance of laughter in its unsophisticated and elementary state—laugh ter, just such as nature has given it to man. And will then these grave professors of "mental science" make us believe that this babe's mirth springs out of any such sensations of contempt toward poor puss, or of congratulations of itself as her superior? Learned nonsense, like this might indeed generate a sort of laughter such as is supposed by these philosophers. This sort of laughter, however, is not elementary; but springs from complicated and artificial emotions: it is not a primitive but a secondary or derived mental state. Now, to come round to our point, the leading fault with Rochefoucauld, and his school, is the taking up of some secondary and artificial instance, of which he gives a very nice analysis, while the primitive element is wholly disregarded. As for example: Rochefoucauld assures us, "That praise is a refined flattery, which one offers to another, first as the purchase-money of his goodwill, and secondly as evidence of his own discrimination, and his candour. All this may be true of sophisticated human nature; but there is, in unsophisticated minds—in the young, and the simple-hearted, and the generous, a pure spontaneous emotion of admiration of what, in any line, is excellent; and there is a natural impulse, to express this genuine emotion, and to render to him who has excited it, the tribute of our pleasureable feelings. Rochefoucauld can never see what is large and obvious, but only what requires a microscope, and the dissecting knife:—hence he has always been a great favourite with short-sighted folks.]

All this means much the same as what Pascal roundly affirms—that every thing is hollow and false in human nature. How far this miserable doctrine sprung, in the minds of these two eminent writers from their unhappy position, as conversant with little else but the debauchery of the French court, might fairly be determined by turning to a specific instance, in which what is affirmed strikes every one at once as a gross calumny, unless restricted to the most profligate circles or communities. Who that has known any thing of English female excellence, or who that has venerated mother, and has lived long enough to see a wife fondly respected by her mature children, can endure to hear it affirmed—"That there are very few women (which, with Rochefoucauld, means none) whose good qualities outlive their beauty." This might be no slander, spoken of the ladies of the court of Louis XIII; but it is abominably false if affirmed of English wives and mothers. And so of the greater part of this writer's sweeping libels upon his fellows. He thoroughly knew men and women of a certain class: not men and women fairly taken as specimens of humanity.

And what we are compelled to say, in the spirit of impartial criticism, of Rochefoucauld, must needs be said too of Pascal; nor would it be ingenious so to yield to a sentiment of deference towards an eminent man, as to omit giving the caution with which his ethical representations ought to be read. Nor is this all; for, as we have already observed, while his personal infirmities, and the general exhaustion of his animal powers, favoured the exercise of that tranquil, penetrating discrimination which belonged to him; the very same constitutional depression manifestly disturbed the notions he entertained of the conditions of human life; and the indulgence of these feelings has exposed him to the jeers of his irreligious editors, Condorcet and Voltaire, who, when he exclaimed—"Quelle chimère est ce donc que l'homme?" exclaim by way of sufficient annotation "Vrai discours du malade!"—"Pascal parle toujours en malade, qui vent que le monde entier souffre."

Pascal says, "I blame alike those who undertake to commend man, and those who set themselves to blame him, and those who endeavour to divert him:" "Ah" says Voltaire, "if you would but yourself have given way a little to amusement, you would have lived longer!" Yes, and if his personal piety had been free from asceticism, and his notions exempt from exaggeration, besides living longer—living to ripen his judgment, to digest his thoughts, and to think and write more, he might, not improbably, have exerted an extensive and lasting influence over the destinies of his country. Voltaire's notes upon Pascal are indeed, for the most part, cold, flippant, and sophistical, like every thing he has written, bearing upon religion; nevertheless, it is but justice to acknowledge that a vein of vigorous good sense runs through them, of which many religious writers might avail themselves, to great advantage.

It is very seldom, except when striving to carry a point, or to give to some important truth the advantage of a violent contrast, that Pascal runs into mysticism: he is not like Fenelon, the mystic always, and by constitution of mind: his statements however are sometimes such as need a little animadversion.—

"The true and only virtue is to hate oneself."—This, by itself, might pass, as meaning only, and by a figure, what our Lord intends when he enjoins his disciples to "hate father, and mother, and their own life also;" but when a phrase of this sort comes to be drawn out, and interpreted literally, by the writer who uses it, it amounts to what is untrue in fact, and unsound in principle.

"There is an injustice in allowing any one to attach himself to us; or to love us; although he may do so freely, and to his own satisfaction … We! we, cannot be any one's end; we cannot satisfy any one:—Are we not soon to die, and thus the object of their love will die? We are therefore to be blamed if we allow any fellow-creature to love us; or if we offer ourselves as lovable to any." More to the same purport might be quoted; and Pascal himself carried out this doctrine in his home circle; and affectionate in temper as he was, he assumed a cold and dry manner towards his near and tender relations, with the view of turning them aside, from "the idolatry of loving him." What a contrast is all this to the natural and man-like warmth of St. Paul, toward his personal friends! Did not St. Paul love his Lord supremely? and did he not lead others to do so too? yet he well knew that this sovereign motive was likely to take the firmest hold of those very minds that are the most alive to every human affection. Nothing can be more untrue in philosophy, or much more pernicious as a practical doctrine, than the principle, which Pascal appears to have assumed, That love is like a mathematical quantity, from which, if you deduct a part, so much less than the whole remains. If this were the fact, then indeed we should be bound to grudge every atom of affection which was diverted from the Creator, by the creature:—to love any thing but God would be—a fraud!

But how are all such theoretic statements scattered the moment we open the book of divine philosophy! The mystic says—"you must not love the creature, lest you deprive God of his due." The Bible says—"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart;" and then after this all has been bestowed, it adds—"Thou shalt love thy neighbour—not to the exclusion of thyself but—as thyself." Here indeed is good sense, and sound morality, and true philosophy. Had the amiable and pious Pascal been a father (and how much more useful a writer would he then probably have been) he would have found a practical refutation of his theory of Love, the moment a second child was put, by its mother, into his paternal arms; for at that bright instant, instead of there taking place, in his bosom, a halving of the love of which his first-born had been the object, he would have felt (his heart near bursting at the time) that the very power of loving was now doubled, and more than doubled, so that, instead of loving the two, with a half love, for each; he loved both, and severally, with a double love.—This may not be mathematics; but assuredly it is human nature. And what holds with two, holds with seven, or with ten.

And so in regard to the devout sentiments; it is not the loving a wife and children that precludes our loving God; but the loving them with a love falsely so called, and which, if analysed, would be found to be nothing better than a refined selfishness:—intemperate in its degree, and involving elements of sensuality, pride and vanity; and which re-acts upon others, out of the narrow circle of our affections, in a manner not much differing from hatred. The doating father or mother is very likely to be found a cold-hearted friend, and a surly neighbour; certainly not an eminent Christian. Pascal, although a mathematician, was ordinarily well aware of the absurdity of applying mathematical logic to moral theorems: sometimes however he falls into this error; and on occasions too, in which the inference he so deduces is likely to be mischievous. What havoc has there not been made of simple facts, and plain principles, by dint of irrefragable syllogisms!—By the help of logic, you may make it as clear as the sun at noon day—that there is no sun at noon day; or at least, that nobody has ever yet seen him, or been warmed and cheered by his beams:—as for instance:—

"If there be a God, we should love him only; and not the creatures.—There is a God; let us then take no delight in the creatures. Wherefore, whatever impells us to attach ourselves to the creature is evil, inasmuch as this either prevents our serving God, if we know him, or prevents our inquiring after him, if we know him not. But we are full of concupiscence, therefore full of wickedness, therefore we are bound to hate ourselves, and every thing else which binds us to any thing, but to God alone." [Our author expresses himself with more discretion, and admits what sufficiently refutes the sophism above quoted. This reasoning, if sound at all, is as applicable to Adam in Paradise, as to Adam out of it. How could man have been formed to love himself and to enjoy the creatures innocently, if the being of a God makes it an act of injustice to love any thing but him?]

But in contradiction to this terse and specious logic, we hear God himself declaring that, "every creature" of his is "good;" and so far as it may minister to our real well being, to temperate delight, is "not to be refused by them that know the truth." And instead of "hating ourselves," we are to "cherish and nourish," while we keep in subjection, even that part of ourselves which is the seat of concupiscence, namely, "our flesh;" and we are to make this love of ourselves the measure of our love to those around us. What we really are to hate, is, neither our bodies, nor our souls, nor the bodies or souls of our neighbours: but simply the evil that dwelleth in ourselves, and in them.

In how different a tone does the same mind express itself, when, softened by the recent death of his venerated father, and forgetting at once the mystic, and the logician, Pascal speaks as a man, and a Christian. Let the reader turn from the passages just quoted, to the Thoughts on death, Chap. xxii. Nor is this the only place, far from it, in which this eminent writer gives utterance to the sentiments of a profound, unaffected, and unsophisticated piety. Such passages, and they are many, have rendered the Thoughts a favourite book with all persons of kindred temper. But we are approaching that part of our subject which we have thought it convenient to separate from the consideration of our author's general views of human nature.

III. We come then to say something further than what has just now been advanced, concerning Pascal's style of Devotional Sentiment. The greater number, no doubt, of those with whom he has been a favourite writer, have regarded him in this point of view, rather than as a reasoner in behalf of Christianity, on which ground modern writers are more likely to be had recourse to, who deal with the difficulties of the argument in that special form in which they are now felt to attach to the subject.

Pascal, as we have already said, stands clear, for the most part, from the entanglements of the illusive mysticism which so much disparages many Romanist writers; and he must, in fact, appear to advantage in this respect, if compared with the choicest of them. His piety is straight forward, intelligible, practical; and, in a word, it is the sentiment of an elevated mind, awakened after it had attained its maturity, to a consciousness of spiritual objects; and of one moreover, who, throughout his course, was so hardly and heavily pressed with bodily sufferings, as to keep him free from excessive refinements, as well as from dry or airy speculations. Pascal's piety is the strong, yet tranquil working of a soul always held near to reality, by that effective teacher of truth, and that stern mistress, of sobriety—Pain. He had found the need of solid consolation, and had felt, what he expresses, that—"There is no consolation, but in Truth;" and this feeling gave him a distaste, not merely of what he might discern to be false, though pleasing, but of whatever might be, on any account, questioned, or which would not bear the most searching examination. All the powers of his penetrating intellect he employed in sifting those elements, whence he might derive a consolation that "maketh not ashamed." Others have put their inventive faculties on the stretch to bring forward something from the depths, or from the heights, wherewith to nourish a dreaming enthusiasm. Pascal found enough, in the simplest and most solemn truths, to engage his heart, and to sustain his fortitude.

Put in comparison with Augustine, as the latter appears in his Confessions, Pascal has not less pathos, nor less genuine elevation; while he avoids altogether those incongruous mixtures of metaphysical speculation with devout feeling, which render the Confessions a jumble of piety and subtility, wherein David and Plato, Paul and Aristotle, are heard confusedly talking together. By the side of Ephrem the Syrian, Pascal is more natural: and a brighter evangelic beam shines upon the path he treads; nor is the reader ever discouraged by the suspicion of an unavowed purpose, besetting us in the perusal of the ascetic writers, one and all—that, namely, of holding up, and of glorifying the monkish institution, in the credit of which the interests of its members and chiefs was implicated. Again; if less pithy and ingenious than Macarius, the Egyptian, he exhibits, in such a comparison, the great benefit which even the Romish community had derived from the storms of the reformation, in clearing the church atmosphere of its miasmas. How sincere soever might have been the piety of some of the ascetics, the garments of these good men are strongly scented with the effluvia of the "dead men's bones, and all corruption," that belonged to the sepulchres, not always "whited sepulchres," which they inhabited.

Pascal should not be measured against that ethereal spirit—Thomas à Kempis, who, by a life-long exercise in the celestial path, and by the utter renunciation of every object, pursuit, and idea, but that of following "the Shepherd's steps," had become a proficient of the first order, in his class. Yet even here our Pascal possesses an advantage, in as much as the atmosphere he breathed was warmer than that which surrounded the cloistered author of the De Imitatione. If Pascal could but have fairly compared himself with some of the choicest of his own communion, and could have traced the difference, all in his own favour as it was, up to its real source, he must have confessed that, through indirect channels, he owed not a little to the very heretics whose names he is almost afraid to utter;—a debt this which, released long ago from the thraldom of his earthly prejudices, he has had opportunity to acknowledge, in that place of peace, where he has met his brethren in Christ, the leaders of the Reformation.

What is it, we might ask, that has made the vast and striking difference which presents itself in turning from the devotional pages of Pascal, to those, for example, of St. Bernard, where, along with impressive, elevated, and Christian-like strains of piety, the reader is repulsed by shocking superstitions, by indications of a disguised ecclesiastical ambition, and by the smothered pride of the ascetic? Why does not Pascal, like the Abbot of Clairvaux, [How lamentably do some of our modern restorers of "ancient Catholicism" fall short of the thorough-going piety of St. Bernard! Hear him—In te (Maria) enim angeli lætitiam, justi gratiam, peccatores veniam, inveniunt in æternum! and again: In periculis, in angustis, in rebus dubiis, Mariam cogita, Mariam invoca. Non recedat ab ore; non recedat à corde! Whole pages equally edifying, or more so, might easily be quoted. But alas for St. Bernard! how feebly do even the most "catholic" among us tread in his steps!] spend his ingenuity, and recommend his eloquence, in dressing up tawdry garlands for the "Queen of Heaven"? or why does he not, in the empassioned tone of a lover, and in the extravagant phrases of a courtier, invoke "Mary, the virgin princess of Angels and Archangels!" If Pascal did nothing of this sort, it was not because his church had taught him better; or had, as a church, admitted any kind of reform, or had disowned and condemned these enormities of her middle-ages saints; for, on the contrary, she had striven hard to keep them agoing, after the world had cried shame of them. But in fact, in the times of Pascal, all sincere and sane minds, within the Romish pale—all but the spiritually debauched, had tacitly admitted a certain element of the reformation, which, while it allowed them to remain within that communion, wrought in them an abhorrence, and an avoidance of its worst corruptions. And what might not have been effected within the morass of popery by the occult operation of this same under current, had the streams continued to flow with a cleansing force and clearness. But the waters of the Reformation, almost immediately becoming turbid, ceased, after the first gush, to carry health at large, to the nations.

But how acceptable soever Pascal's profound devotional sentiments may be to the pious reader, he will probably feel as if still a something were wanting to bring these sentiments intimately home to his protestant notions of evangelical piety. Let this be granted; and when it is granted, let the significant fact be adverted to—That, as often as we move from the narrow ground of our own times and community, as often as we, so to speak, change climate in Christianity, and put ourselves under another aspect of the heavens, we become conscious of a difference, which at the first, at least, we pronounce to be a difference for the worse. The temperature of the foreign region is not what our spiritual sensations accord with: the conventional style is not the same:—it is the same gospel we are looking at, but seen at a different angle.

With most pious persons it happens, when they may have chanced thus to set foot upon a foreign soil of Christianity, that they hasten homeward, tightened rather than loosened in their predilections, Be it so;—the many, we must allow, are more safe in a strict adherence to the religious usages of their minds, than they could be in admitting any, even the slightest modifications of them. But it should be otherwise with those, and surely they are more than a few, whose habit it is to think and compare, and who dare to bring every principle they hold and every practice they conform to, under scrutiny. Such then will be forward to confess that the Christianity of their particular times, and country, and communion, is at the best—only a particular style of the universal Truth:—a phase of the absolute brightness—a mode of the unchanging perfection. The Christianity of the New Testament is one; but has the Christianity of any body of men, since the apostolic times, been that one, and neither more nor less? Christianity, look for it where or when we may, is a something more, and a something less than the simple truth, embodied in the apostolic writings.

There are those who, while they would be shocked to affirm of any individual Christian, that he held, and held forth, and realized, the Truth, without alloy or defect, yet cherish a silent persuasion, concerning the particular form of it to which they are attached, that it is (or is within a very little of being) the absolutely True; and their persuasion goes someway beyond the sober belief that among various styles of Christianity, their own, taken as a whole, is to be preferred. Now one of the consequences of harbouring any such fond supposition, is not simply the fostering an exclusive temper, likely to degenerate into sheer uncharitableness, but the shutting ourselves out from the signal benefits to be derived from a free communion with the pious—the true church, of all times and countries. The Christian, enfeebled by this sort of sensibility of the spiritual appetite, can eat of no loaf that has not been baked in his own oven:—the slightest peculiarity of flavour, even in the most wholesome food, gives him a suspicion of poison, and a nausea; and his spiritual condition is precisely analagous to that of some pitiable hypochondriacs, who can never travel without the attendance of their own cook, without a supply of water from their own spring, or without their own bed and linen—in a word, a caravan equipment.

But can we wish, for ourselves, to be trained in this sort of hyper-delicacy? If not, and the more effectually to get rid of it, we should (to return to our figure) use ourselves to as much travelling as we can afford; that is to say, in plain terms, make ourselves conversant with the piety of the Christians of other times and countries. Even if it were true that we may always be supplied from our home circle with enough of what is edifying; and with more than hitherto we have made good use of, still are we not exempted from the obligation (if we would be substantially wise) of looking wider for our spiritual nourishment; and if indeed the ailment be intrinsically wholesome, the farther it has come, in reaching us, the better.

The benefits are great of thus going abroad for our religious reading. At the first, we distaste the foreign article, but after awhile we confess the good it has done us. Those who think themselves to be gifted, or who in fact are gifted, with the requisite intelligence and discretion, and are not so unstable in mind as to be liable to be presently moved from their firmest convictions, will not fail to derive a marked invigoration of their religious feelings, as well as a happy expansion of their Christian sympathies, from the practice of going far and wide in their devotional and theological reading. How small soever may be the portion of time which can be allotted, daily, to such means of improvement, let the rule be to spend it, not in the company of the writers of our own age, country, and sect; but rather with such as may come to hand from remote times and places, and from other communions.

In compliance with this rule (if it be a good one) many of the Romanist devotional writers may be read with advantage; and if we would wish for one to lead the way in this field, Pascal is the very writer in whose company we shall feel the least strange: and who in the easiest manner, will introduce us to the circle of his associates. Are we afraid of popery?—those only need admit this fear whose minds are already in a thraldon which is essentially popish.

IV. Pascal does not, in this collection of his Thoughts, present himself, formally, in the character of a theologian. The Thoughts, many of them, are argumentative; but few of them polemical. It may however be useful to the reader to prepare him to see, in a true light, that aspect of Christian theology, in which Pascal, and a host of excellent writers besides, out of the pale of the Lutheran reformation, have regarded the scheme of salvation.

Nothing less than a habit of extensive reading, or we should better say, of reading in all directions, will make it easy for us to place ourselves in a position whence we may candidly and correctly estimate the doctrinal principles of writers, either anterior to the Lutheran reformation, or not participating in its spirit. A certain phraseology, a certain intentness and explicitness, in reference to a single point of Christian belief; a peculiar animation, the product of a momentous and eager controversy, have attached, more or less to all protestant divines, and especially to those among ourselves who rank with what is termed, the evangelical school. Now it must be granted that, whatever importance we may attribute either to the doctrine maintained by the reformers against Rome, or to the particular phrases which have been authenticated as the best for conveying that doctrine, it is one thing to have opposed a particular truth, when directly affirmed in our hearing; and another thing not to fall in with the terms of it, because we have not come into collision with the argument concerning it. Thus, to take another instance, the rule and the test of orthodoxy, in regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, which we may apply to writers contemporary with the Arian controversy, ought not, in equity, to be applied to the ante-nicene Fathers.—Certain points however, important they were found to be, on inquiry, not having been formally argued, the modes of expression current, were more vague and far more susceptible of an ambiguous rendering. It is controversy that fixes the usage of theological language; as well as actually compels them, individually, to wheel to the right, or left, and to choose their party.

Now our Pascal speaks of salvation by Christ, not precisely as Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Jewel, have taught Protestants to speak of it, and which mode or style, is not so altogether simple and spontaneous, as it is polemical. Nevertheless he speaks of it—of redemption, and of the Redeemer, and of the mode of our reconciliation with God, just as we find the same momentous truths expressed by the Greek Christian writers, one and all, from Polycarp to Chrysostom. Did these good men allow it to be supposed that there was salvation in any other name than in that of Christ? or did they scruple to affirm that this salvation was effected by his offering himself up, "the just for the unjust?" Is the name of the Saviour, as the only hope of guilty man, and as the gracious Shepherd of souls, seldom on their lips? By no means. But they none of them use (nor does Pascal) that precise controversial style in speaking of justification, or observe that polemical precision, which has come to be considered in certain quarters as the criterion of soundness in the faith.

And yet, could but the most jealous stickler for evangelical accuracy read the "Thoughts on death," particularly the passages referred to in the margin, or the "Prayer for grace in Sickness," not knowing whence they came, and uninformed of the fatal circumstance, that these breathings issued from papistical lips;—could such a reader doubt the spirituality of the author? This we must assume to be impossible; and if so, then we also assume it as certain that there are more styles than one of that piety which is conveyed to the hearts of men by "one and the same Spirit:"—It must then be an impiety to disallow any of the species or varieties of the grace so imparted; nor is it anything less than to limit the divine operations.

"Justification by faith," to quote an excellent writer, "or that free forgiveness which is offered, without our deservings, through the righteousness of Christ, has, we all know, been styled by a great authority, the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ. But, profoundly important and absolutely essential as this great doctrine is, still, it may be questioned whether its rank, comparatively with other doctrines, is not higher in the scale of Protestantism, than in that of the scripture revelation generally; whether in other words, it does not occupy a more prominent part in the system of Christianity as opposed to popery, than in the system of Christianity considered in itself." [Woodward's Thoughts, Essays, and Sermons.]

It does not appear that Pascal had, in any instance, directed the forces of his mind toward theological questions, as such:—he took things as he found them among the better class of Romanist divines. It is thus that he states in rather crude terms, the doctrine of original sin; and if he affirms nothing more than what might be made good by quotations from Augustine or from some modern writers, he surely goes beyond what can be sustained by fair usage of Scripture. But then, again, he perplexes the partisans of any school; for if on one page, he falls in with the Westminster Confession, on the next, perhaps he is found no better than a sheer Arminian. Nevertheless, whether Calvinist, or Arminian, or neither, he speaks as one who has been "taught from above," and who knows how to build on "the sure foundation." The time, let it be hoped, is coming on, in which less solicitude will be felt concerning the theological dialect of parties, or of individuals; and when far more importance will be attached to what are the unquestionable and the palpable evidences of spirituality. It was thus in the primitive age, when, whoever lived a Christian life, and was faithful to the death, was accounted a Christian; but it ceased to be so after the time when all minds had been thoroughly heated and distorted by furious and wordy controversies.

V. We have, in the last place, to speak of Pascal's Thoughts as embodying an argument for Religion in general; and for Christianity, as well as for Jansenism, and for Romanism.

Looking simply at the relative bulk of the several parts of this collection, the argumentative portion is the larger, or at least it amounts to a full half of the whole. Those of the Thoughts which, in the present translation, stand foremost, constitute a regular, although it may seem a broken chain of reasoning, in the course of which a gradual development of consecutive propositions is effected, such as might be imagined actually to have been elicited by an intelligent and candid mind, honestly inquiring for truth, and starting from principles questioned by few. These Thoughts offer a sort of ratiocinative soliloquy, sometimes running into the form of a dialogue, and (a fact which the reader should be apprised of, and should bear in mind) sometimes propounding, without notice, the probable objections of an opponent, which are to meet their reply in the next paragraph. A very unfair advantage has been taken, by some of Pascal commentators, of this mode of presenting his argument; and which, no doubt, he would have set clear of any possible ambiguity, had he lived to digest his materials.

The utility and merit of treatises in defence of religion generally, or specifically of Christianity, must be held to hinge on the previous question—To what class of persons is the argument addressed?—to Assailants, who are to be driven from their ground; or to Inquirers, who desire to be informed and confirmed. It would have been well if these very distinct purposes, which demand to be pursued each in the mode and spirit proper to it, had always been kept apart by Christian apologists. There seems some reason to believe that the slight, and often ambiguous effect produced by the ablest works of this kind, upon the minds of the persons for whose benefit they are intended, is to be accounted for mainly on this ground—that a mixture of incongruous arguments has been admitted into them; the writers, on one page, encountering the perverse, obdurate, and flippant disbeliever, and on the next, addressing himself to those who ask for nothing but to have the question fairly and calmly set forth, and cleared of the difficulties which, in their view, surround it. An argument may be such that, while it fails to confound the scoffer, it may be so much more than enough for simply informing the inquirer, that it rather alarms and perplexes him. Meantime those just and calm representations which, though not severely conclusive, would satisfy and gladden a candid temper, furnish only occasions of triumph to the virulent sophist, who is not to be silenced but by the most severe and condensed reasoning.

In fact there are hardly to be found two classes of minds more dissimilar in their intellectual and moral characteristics, than the two, now referred to, and which have often been treated as one and the same, by those who have undertaken to deal with infidelity. The ill consequences of this want of discrimination, on the part of many of our apologists, has perhaps been of small account in relation to those whose infidelity, springing from impulses not at all connected with reason, is not to be removed by argument. Such persons may be silenced for an hour; but they are never convinced by that which is enough to convince them. But as to those who, in fact, should be chiefly if not exclusively kept in view by Christian apologists, these, conscious as they are of a willingness—nay perhaps, an intense anxiety to be relieved of their doubts, and yet finding themselves treated as opponents, if not enemies, have either mournfully turned away from their unfriendly guide, or have given indulgence to a reciprocal feeling of resentment, of which in the end, the Christian system itself, and all its professors, have come to be the objects.

Pascal's strain of argument for religion, and for Christianity, ought, in the main, to be considered as addressed to minds of the last named class; that is to say, to persons occupying the position in which he himself had stood, when, having been profoundly affected by religious considerations, he had looked about for reasons, corroborative of the principles which already, though vaguely apprehended, had obtained a decisive influence over him. The author seems, in fact, to be retracing his own path, and to be formally stating the considerations or the general proofs, which had presented themselves to his own mind in working his way onward toward a full and cordial acceptance of the hope of the gospel; and to persons in a like state of mind, these Thoughts can hardly fail to be highly acceptable.

The Christian revelation, while, as to its external form, it is a communication of facts previously unknown, is, as to its substance, a fresh conveyance to mankind of the lost elements of moral and spiritual well-being. Now, while mere reasoning may suffice to put beyond all reasonable doubt the facts affirmed in the Scriptures, much more than any process of reasoning can supply, is needed to bring any human mind into the position in which the substance of the Christian revelation can be apprehended: and yet it is alone from such an apprehension of these moral and spiritual rudiments, that an efficacious or steady belief even of the facts of Christianity can arise. A belief in these facts is an opinion, coming and going, like the gleams of a showery day; but not beaming with any power, upon the character or conduct:—nothing is ripened by any such variable influence.

But the belief that attends, or that springs from a perception of the moral and spiritual elements of the gospel scheme—a belief animated by a discernment of the divine perfection of our Lord's character, constitutes altogether another sort of mental condition, and is as unlike the other, as our waking impressions are unlike our dreams. The seeming paradox is therefore substantially true, that the Christian system must already have been admitted, as real and divine, before the main part of its evidence, or the more convincing portion of it, can have been understood.

The most irreligious minds have, at all times, dimly discerned the moral splendour of the gospel; just as we are conscious of the presence of the sun above the horizon, in a cloudy day; and such minds, moreover, have admitted the wisdom and excellence of single points of the Christian ethics; just as the blind are pleased when, from a collection of rare and beautiful objects, this and that article, a stalactite, a nautilus, a gem, is put into their hands: "Ah, how fine is this," say they; but what know they of the wonders of the museum, as it offers its ten thousand specimens to those who have eyes?

A genuine history of conversions from infidelity would, we believe, confirm our principle, that, in all such cases, a vital change, by whatever means effected, has first put the intellect in a new position; as well as altered the temperament of the soul; and that then, the argumentative evidence, which never disappoints those who ingenuously give it their attention, has made them rationally, as well as spiritually, believers. It is well that there should be treatises (concise and dense always) to which, when occasion demands, infidels may be referred, and which they may be boldly challenged to refute. But we want works of a very different sort to meet the case of those who are to be treated as having already taken their position on the side of truth.

Pascal's Thoughts (the portion now spoken of) come under the latter, rather than the former description. Had they been of the kind to stop the mouth of the gainsayer, or to chastise his arrogance and flippancy, neither Voltaire nor Condorcet, we may be assured, would have given them to the world with their annotations. The reader, then, should look only for what he will actually find—namely, considerations, not condensed proofs. In our own sifting times the Christian evidences have been analysed, and brought into a state of argumentative perfection, which leaves Pascal's mode of treating them in the rear; that is to say, if we are in quest of irrefragable logic. Yet it is true that minds seeking rather for general views of the subject, than for the severity of proof, may, with peculiar advantage, take him as their guide.

A general scheme of the author's argument in behalf of Christianity, as sketched by himself in a long conversation with his friends, and of which notes were taken soon afterwards, has been prefixed to the Thoughts by the French editors. But a concise statement, to the same purport, constitutes the 11th chapter of the present edition, and to this the reader is referred, as being, in fact, a proper introduction to the whole of the argumentative portion of the Thoughts. The intelligent reader will not need more than he there finds, for opening to him the plan which the author would have fully developed, had he lived to prepare his Thoughts for the press.

If, once and again, the English reader thinks that he recognises in these pages certain views of the evidences, not new to him, and which he may even remember to have seen more fully expounded elsewhere; he should, in mere justice to our author, be reminded, that Pascal was in fact the first modern writer to suggest some very striking and convincing considerations, which others, and especially those of our own country, have caught up, elaborated, and presented in a still more advantageous manner. Pascal has set in a new light, or was the first to discern, some of those nicer characteristics of historical and moral truth which the acumen, and the fine moral feeling of the modern European mind fits it to appreciate. The early Christian apologists have indeed anticipated most of the prominent proofs of the truth of Christianity; but there are other proofs, not at all less conclusive, although of a refined and occult kind, which it required the intelligence of later times to discover. Neither Porphyry, nor Celsus, nor their contemporaries, could have been made to comprehend, even if Origen himself had perceived them, those delicate, yet infallible marks of genuineness in the gospel history, and in the Epistles, which, to modern minds, constitute the irrefragable part of the argument.

One might take, as an instance, a thought propounded in a very broken manner by Pascal, but which has been adopted, and much insisted upon, by later writers. What we mean is the indirect argument in proof of the reality of our Lord's statements concerning the invisible world, and the vast movements of the Divine government, resulting from the ease, simplicity, and nativeness (naïvete) of his manner, when touching upon these superhuman subjects. "An artisan or labourer who speaks of the wealth he has never touched or seen, a lawyer who talks of battles, or a private man who describes the state of kings, is wont to speak in terms of exaggeration, or of wonder, or of constraint; whereas the wealthy talk of the disposal of large sums, with indifference, and in a common style; the general describes a siege coolly and simply; and a king enters upon the interests of an empire, just as a private person does upon the most ordinary affairs. And thus it is that Jesus Christ speaks of the things of God, and of eternity. To feel the full force of this argument, or consideration, one should be well aware of the style of those, whether Jewish prophets, or Grecian sages, who, heretofore, had taken up kindred topics. Our Lord's manner, in every such instance, was precisely what was natural, and what became him who, having, "been with the Father from before the foundation of the world," had lately descended to hold converse with man, concerning the things which he had seen and known.

In meeting then, in Pascal, with thoughts of this sort, some of them perhaps, hastily and incompletely expressed, let not the reader think slightingly of them, as having found the same better stated elsewhere; but rather remember that Pascal's Thoughts have now, for a hundred years and more, been carried hither and thither; and that the collection has been a seed-book, which has stocked the fields of our English Christian literature with fruitfulness and beauty.

Moreover, some few of the Thoughts, in this portion of the work, may, at the first, startle the reader, who perhaps will be ready to reject them as paradoxical, exaggerated, or absolutely false. But in most such instances, if what is roughly thrown out in one place, be collated with analogous passages elsewhere occurring, a clue will be furnished for discovering those modifications, or connecting statements, which were present to the writer's mind, and apart from which he would never have given such passages to the world. Many things also are advanced peremptorily, which must be received with limitations or exceptions, as thus—"Charity is the one and only thing aimed at in Scripture; and whatsoever therein found does not tend directly to this end, is to be accounted figurative; for inasmuch as there is but one (ultimate) end or intention, all that, in plain terms, does not point that way, is figure." This may be true, roundly stated, or very generally understood; but if assumed as a rule of interpretation, it would carry us as far from sober truth as the Rabbins, or as Origen and some of the Fathers have gone, in allegory; and would turn the history of real events—the story of battles and conspiracies, into something as airy as Bunyan's Holy War.

Pascal, as we have already said, although perfectly sincere in his profession of Romanism, took a position in relation to those corruptions that are properly popish, such as places him toward protestantism; and, a few incidental phrases excepted, it might not be easily guessed that he was not such in fact. It is only as occasion offers that he comes forward, as the apologist of the Romish church; and it is due to him—to his friends of Port Royal, and to many of the best of men who have lived and died within its pale, to place ourselves, for a moment, in that point of view whence they were accustomed to look abroad over Christendom. It is not difficult to gather either, from the explicit arguments, or from the casual phrases employed by writers of the class to which Pascal belonged, the general principles or axioms, which, when once admitted as unquestionable, secured their submission to the church, notwithstanding their knowledge of her flagrant corruptious and gross superstitions.

Resting chiefly upon the purport of our Lord's last conversations with his disciples, as recorded by St. John, and which may fairly be assumed as intended, in a peculiar manner, to embody the first principles of the institute he was then consigning to their hands, the good men now referred to, gathered what they might well consider as the prime and constant characteristics of the true church, namely, union, uniformity of worship, agreement in opinion, and continuity, or a perpetuated, unbroken transmission, from age to age, of the doctrine and the institutions of the gospel.

Now although it may be very easy to invalidate, in detail, the claims advanced by the Church of Rome to these characteristics, and to show, that her boasted union has been that only of a civil despotism—that her uniformity, so far as it has been maintained, has been the product of terror and cruelty; and that the scheme of religion she has transmitted has been, not the apostolic doctrine, and worship, but a mass of later inventions;—notwithstanding these just exceptions, which we protestants take against the pretensions of Rome; yet it must be granted that she possesses—or that at least she can make a show of possessing, what, in some tolerable degree, answers to the above named characteristics. Of whatever sort it may have been, and by whatever unholy means secured, the Church of Rome has actually held up, before the world, the imposing spectacle of a widely extended polity, united under one head—adhering, in all lands to the same worship, and to the same ecclesiastical constitution, and flowing down, from age to age, without any such violent or conspicuous interruptions, as could be held to destroy the identity of the system. The Romanist could always say, "We are one church: we have one head, one faith, and the same sacraments; and what we are now, is what those were from whom we derived one spiritual existence: we have not innovated, we have not revolted."

This view of their position, even considered by itself, could not but strongly influence serious minds: and then, with what was it contrasted? The first and broad characteristic of the Reformation—the mark which it carried with it into every country, was—not ecclesiastical revolt merely, in relation to Rome, but internal variance—disunion, and innovation, or novelty. But were not these the very tokens of error—the symbols of antichrist? Could it be necessary to inquire any further concerning the pretension of those who were seen to be waging a bitter and fierce warfare among themselves? Thus Pascal, and Fenelon, and many others, have looked at the question between the Romish Church, and her assailants: and although they ought to have gone more deeply into this question, and to have reached its real merits, they felt, as men fearing God, satisfied that they stood on the safer side of the great modern schism; and that even if the Church might cover some abuses, she was THE CHURCH still; and the sole mistress or dispensatrix of eternal life.

Not only have views, such as these, retained good and enlightened men of the past age in allegiance to Rome; but they still produce the same effects, and must continue to secure for her the vitalizing support of many conscientious persons, throughout Europe, until protestantism, or, let us rather say, until the Christianity of the New Testament, shall have approved itself to the world by exhibiting the genuine characteristics of union, uniformity, or unanimity, and perpetuity. Then shall all men flock toward the church, when they know, without a question, where to find it!

A very useful lesson may be gathered in following a mind, like Pascal's on those particular occasions when, overruled, or, we might say, overawed, by an assumed axiom, it comes to regard the plainest matters of fact altogether in a false light. We may be ready to wonder that one so well informed as was Pascal, and so clearsighted, could have blinded himself to the true state of the case regarding the Romish auricular confession. "Can one imagine," says he, "anything more kind, more tender than the practice of the church (in directing us to unburden our consciences to the priest, and to him alone)? Nevertheless, such is the depravity of the human mind, that it thinks even this benign law hard; and in fact, this has been one of the principal reasons of the revolt of a great part of Europe against the church."

Pascal, who was conversant with the ecclesiastical history of Spain—to say no more, had he not come to the knowledge of the unutterable abominations connected with the confessional in that country? or could he think that these abuses, everywhere prevalent, as they were, and in some countries reaching the extreme point of atrocity, could he think them incidental only, or that the evils inseparable from the practice were yet outweighed by its benefical consequences? No:—he could not have made good any one of these suppositions; but, at all events, auricular confession was an inseparable part of the Romish system; and to question its expediency would have been to stand out, declared, as a heretic. He scorned to shelter himself in mere silence; and therefore breaks through every check of reason, not to say of truth, boldly to defend what, although indefensible, could not be disclaimed.

As a matter of history, every one knows, that it was not confession, but the confessional;—not the abstract usage, or principle; but the universal and invariable abuse of it, that roused the indignation of northern Europe, and put into the hands of the Reformers one of the most efficacious of those weapons with which they demolished the papal edifice, in their several countries.

It would be easy to dispose, in a similar manner, of all those passages wherein Pascal explicitly vindicates the practices of the Romish Church; but it cannot be necessary to do so: his personal adherence to that church is a matter, as of no perplexity, so of no general importance; he advances nothing in behalf of its errors that is new, or that has not been, a hundred times, met by irrefragable argument; mean time, as we have said, the main stress of his mind presses against the spirit of the Romish Church; nor is he a writer whom modern Romanists can be fond of adducing, as an authority on their side. Take this specimen of Pascal's feeling in relation to the sacramental question, a question which, in fact, condenses within itself the elements of the great and ancient controversy between superstition and Christianity: and, which in its modern form, is the pivot of the polemics of our day.

"The Jews were of two parties—the one having the sentiments only of the heathen world:—the other possessing the feelings of Christians (essentially so). The Messiah, according to the carnal Jews, was to be a great secular prince; and according to the carnal Christians he has come to release us from the obligation of loving God, and to bestow upon us sacraments, which work every thing for us, apart from our concurrence. But neither was the one true Judaism, nor is the other true Christianity. The real Jews, and the real Christians, have acknowledged a Messiah, who should make them love God; and by the means of this love, triumph over their enemies."

This passage expresses as well, and as concisely perhaps, as it could be expressed, the vital distinction which, in all ages, has divided the professedly Christian world. Whoever takes his part with the secular minded Jew, attaches himself to a system obsolete, corruptible, and evanescent. But concerning those who "hold to the spirit," we need hardly ask whether, in, and by the world, they be called papists or protestants; for they are of that kingdom that "shall not be shaken," and they are those who, in the end, shall be knit together as members of the true church.

Firm in this great and first principle, Pascal too readily admitted some positions which his acute and logical mind must instantly have rejected, had he chosen to bring them under examination. Thus, for instance, he so lays down the conditions of an authentic miracle, as shall save ample space for all the lying wonders of the Romish romancers—"When a miracle," says he, "is witnessed, one ought either to yield to it (admit its reality) or be able to adduce extraordinary reasons to the contrary:—one should ask, whether he who performs it denies the being of a God, denies Jesus Christ, or denies the Church?" Now we might be very content to let this rule pass without comment, if only a due care were always given to the determination of the previous, and very pertinent question—Is such or such an alleged miracle, a miracle indeed? The exercise of this necessary and reasonable discretion would, in fact, supersede Pascal's rule, inasmuch as the few instances, remaining, after such a scrutiny has been made, would, all of them, be on the side of truth, and would all range around the apostolic history. But Pascal had, as a Romanist, to look to innumerable miracles beside those wrought in the first age of the church; and among the number, to that of the "Holy Thorn."

Were there not an inference of practical importance—an inference touching our own times, derivable from the fact, one should willingly draw a veil over the extreme credulity of so great a man: (we will not now speak of the cure itself in whatever way effected) we mean his credulity in regard to this boasted relic of Port Royal. Did he then know so little of the wholesale manufacture of, not "holy thorns" merely, but of true crosses—veritable nails—genuine rags, reeds, hammers, spikes, as well as of leg-bones, arm-bones, finger-joints, and what not? Did he know so little of this monkish craft, as to believe, without inquiry, in the genuineness of the Port Royal "holy thorn?" And must we yield an indulgence to Pascal, the geometrician, of the 17th century, which we do not grant, without reluctance, to the benighted St. Louis of the 13th century? One might have thought that the author of the tract on the properties of the cycloid, would have left "holy thorns" to be the play-things of the debauched and debilitated understandings of monks! But it is not so; meantime who shall calculate the damage thus done to the religious sentiments of mankind, by the like insanities of powerful minds? It has been thus that the entire influence of Pascal's religious writings in France has been turned aside, and his powerful thrust at impiety successfully parried by a contemptuous reference, on the part of his infidel commentators, to the childish superstitions to which he was accustomed to surrender himself. For example. Condorcet, in putting forward a foolish paper of abbreviated notes of Pascal's daily religious observances, and which was constantly worn by him as a sort of amulet, stitched in his dress, insultingly exclaims—"What an interval between this paper and the treatise on the cycloid? Nothing, in fact, can better serve to explain how all the thoughts contained in this collection could have come from the same brain.—The author of the treatise on the cycloid wrote some; and the rest are the work of the author of the amulet."

So it is, and it must be confessed with some appearance of reason, however inequitably, that the whole weight of Pascal's testimony in favour of religion, is thrown out of the scale, and placed to the account of that infirmity of temper to which he gave way. Let good and eminent men be as absurd as they please in things which the world can never hear of; but let them remember that every absurdity of theirs which comes to be talked of, costs nothing less than the well-being of hundreds, or of thousands of souls! Expensive recreations truly, are the religious freaks and follies—the superstitions and the extravagancies, of the wise and good.

There are those around us, even now, who might derive a caution or two, of another kind, from this great man's example. Pascal—right in a general principle, but deplorably wrong in the application of it, believed himself compelled to deliver over to hopeless perdition, one and all, the very men whose memory we protestants love and honour, as the restorers of Christianity, and the emancipators of Europe. "The body can no more live," says he, "without the head, than the head without the body. Whoever then separates himself from the one, or the other, no longer belongs to the body, and has nothing more to do with Jesus Christ. Neither all the virtues, nor martyrdom, nor any austerities, nor any good works, can be of the least utility out of the pale of the Church, and apart from the communion of the head of the Church, that is to say—the Pope."

How sad the consequences, as affecting his own charity and comfort as a Christian—how sad as affecting his influence in after times, was that artificial blindness which excluded from his view the unquestionable piety of many of the reformers, and of thousands of their followers? What has so often—nay in every age hitherto, of the Christian history, turned the best heads, and chilled the best hearts, has been the placing reliance upon that flimsy ecclesiastical logic which has made it appear that the great realities, for the very sake of which the Christian dispensation was given to men, namely—the active love of God, and of our neighbour, are of no account, apart from certain conditions, attaching to the medium of conveying this dispensation from hand to hand. As if, in visiting a people full-grown, fair, and ruddy, whom one found to subsist on the "finest of the wheat," one should sourly turn upon them, and say—'you delude yourselves, altogether, in fancying yourselves robust and happy:—these appearances of health are utterly fallacious:—you are, in fact, although you think it not, you are emaciated, squallid, and feeble—You must be so, for the seed-corn wherewith, at the first, your fields were sown, was surreptitiously obtained from the royal granaries, and therefore could not produce a wholesome crop—nay, it is all virulent poison.'

Such is the language that has been held by narrow minds to whoever has stood outside of their little enclosure! The ecclesiastical virulence of one age differs extremely little from that of another: All is the same, saving a phrase or two. "Except ye be circumcised, and keep the law of Moses, ye cannot be saved." So spake the staunch men of the apostolic age. "Out of the church, that is to say, not in allegiance to the Pope; there is no salvation." So have spoken the successors and representatives of the Jewish zealots, from Gregory I, to the present day. "Deprived of Christ's sacraments, there can be no life in you; but Christ's sacraments are in the hands of Christ's ministers, and of none else; and his ministers are they whose canonical descent from the apostles, in the line of episcopal ordination, can be unequivocally traced:—the merest shadow of uncertainty in the matter, of ecclesiastical genealogy, is fatal to the pretensions of the holiest of men, or of any who may seem holy; for them, and the communities under their care, the abyss of perdition yawns wide." Thus, even now, is one half of the protestant world talked to by the other half!

But what must we think if, in the fine net-work of reasoning on which these anathemas hang, there should be some flaw!—some rotten thread! what if, in the historical materials out of which it is spun, some facts have been too hastily assumed!—What? why then these adventurous logicians have been coolly outraging Christian charity, they have been maligning thousands of Christ's faithful people, they have been poisoning the hearts of their followers, they have been heaping calumnies upon the gospel itself, and so have turned multitudes of souls out of the path of truth, and all this has been done on the strength of a chain of syllogisms, which alas! happens, in some part of it, to want a link!

Many there are, unthought of by these zealots, who, with some honest anxiety, desiring to inform themselves concerning Christianity, stumble at the threshold, when they find that those of its adherents who stand the highest in rank and office, and who claim to be the only authorized interpreters of its mysteries, are inflamed by the spirit of cursing and bitterness, and that arrogance and jealousy are the characteristics of their temper! The vague and suppressed feeling excited in thousands of ordinary minds, on such occasions, gets utterance through the lips of the crafty and politic enemies of all religion. We are unwilling here to quote Voltaire, at length; yet it might be useful (to some at least) to read and take home to themselves, the keen and just, although in the main sophistical comment, which he attaches to that passage of the Thoughts in which Pascal sums up his argument for Christianity; an argument irrefragable, if the gospel be looked at abstractedly; or if the noiseless story of its genuine followers in every age, be regarded; but miserably contradicted by the general current of what is called church history;—the history of ecclesiastical arrogance.

Pascal's better nature triumphs, once and again, over his faulty church logic, when happily, he forgets Rome, and the heretics. In the passage referred to in the margin, he lays down a great principle—a principle clear and inexpressibly momentous, and which in substance is this—That the manifest operation and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, producing the Christian graces in the hearts of men, must, in all cases, be acknowledged and allowed to authenticate, substantially, the institutions through which the Spirit has thus deigned to operate. To reject or to scorn the work of God, in renovating the souls of men, is, if not to commit the sin against the Holy Ghost, at least to limit him, and to arrogate to ourselves the disposal of his sovereign favours!

Nearly all that relates, in this collection, to the Jansenist and Port Royal controversies, is comprised in the passages referred to beneath; nor do these passages demand any special remark;—they are out of the author's ordinary style—less calm, less logical, and such as, by themselves, would leave the reader in suspense, as to the merits of the controversy between the Jesuits and the Jansenists; or rather, would give him the impression that this controversy, like so many, evenly divided faults and merits. Yet this was not the fact, and a perusal of the story of the Port Royalists may almost be spoken of as an act of justice, due to those oppressed witnesses for the truth in France.

In England, Pascal's writings, and his Thoughts especially, have always been in favour among meditative and intelligent religious readers. But with us, whose religious literature is so ample and various, this single writer presents himself as one in a crowd:—we converse with him delighted, for an hour, and turn to another. In France, which can hardly be said to possess a native religious literature, or at best a very limited classical indigenous divinity, Pascal is read much rather as an authenticated model of style, and as an acute and eloquent dialectician, than properly as a religious writer: there are not religious readers enough to maintain his celebrity in that character. His mind and his language are admired:—his principles utterly disregarded; at least it is generally so. Nor indeed can it be thought likely that, as a religious writer, he should regain his influence at home. The controversy in which he acquired his chief celebrity, was special and temporary; and if ever the Gallican church shall be anew agitated by theological debate, the questions then to be mooted will be of quite another sort; neither St. Cyran, nor Jansen, nor St. Agustin will give their names to the quarrel. And as to the Thoughts, the greater portion of them, relating to the Christian evidences, are likely to be superseded (if ever the general subject awakens the French mind) by works produced at the spur of the occasion, adapted to modern modes of thinking, and squared by more exact and erudite methods of argumentation.

May that day of religious agitation in France soon come on! Nor must it be said that there are no indications of its near approach. We do not here allude to the silent diffusion of the Scriptures, which, it may be hoped, will produce at length, a happy effect upon the middle and lower classes. Nor should we care to enquire particularly into the internal condition and prospects of the Reformed and Lutheran communions; inasmuch as many reasons, not now to be set forth, seem to render it highly improbable that the religious renovation of France (if it is ever to take place) should burst out from the dying embers of protestantism.—The French people, we may be sure, will not take their religion from those who appear themselves to have so little to spare; or in fact from the decendants and representatives of the Hugunots.

There are, however, facts which warrant the belief that a stirring of life is even now taking place in the heart of the Gallican church:—inquiry is awake, and sedulous studies are pursued, such as must, or probably will, bring with them some change of the ecclesiastical position of the church, and some reforms. The French clergy of the present day, very unlike, as a body, the creatures of the revolution, and of Napoleon's church government, are reported to be men who will not leave themselves to be contemned, like their immediate predecessors, as the dregs of the people—persons who, for a morsel of bread, would do the dirty work of the state, in carrying forward the mummeries of the government superstition. Such, too generally, were the Bonaparte clergy; but such are not, if report speak truly of them, the clergy of the Gallican church at the present moment.

Feeling their destitution of a native theological literature, the clergy (as it appears) are eagerly demanding that of other countries, even not exclusive of some of our protestant commentaries. But especially are they recurring to the Greek and Latin Fathers—the accredited literature of the Romish church. The lately revived demand for the Fathers in this country, had already added a thirty per cent, to the commercial value of the best editions; and now, a not less vivid anxiety, on the part of the French clergy, to possess them, has still further enhanced that value. Until of late, the tide of ecclesiastical literature set steadily from France and Germany, towards England, where a ready sale was obtained for the importations which drained the foreign shops and libraries. But at length this tide has turned, and many ponderous works—the Benedictine editions, and the like, after having seen the day and "taken the air," during a few years' sojourn in Eng-gland, are finding their way again across the channel, and to Paris, where they meet purchasers, eager to possess them at a price which leaves a handsome profit in the hands of all who have been concerned in pushing them round in this circuit.

Nor is this all; for at a time when no such enterprise would be ventured upon in London, the Parisian press is issuing costly editions of the most voluminous of the Fathers—Chrysostom, and Augustin:—reprints of the noble abours of the congregation of St. Maur!

But it will be said, disdainfully or despondingly, "What of this? What will be the probable issue of a revived study of the Fathers in France, except it be to rivet popery anew upon the minds of the clergy? What are the Fathers but the authors and patrons of popery?" We look for a different and happier result of this return of ecclesiastical erudition. Taught by the course of controversies elsewhere, and of which they cannot be ignorant, to look out, as they read, for the distinction between the Romish superstitions and ancient Christianity, this distinction will meet them at every turn: it will (with all its important consequences) be forced upon their notice; and even if, for a while, they are confirmed in their respect for so much of popery as belongs to ancient Christianity, they can hardly fail, in the end, to resent, with a fresh indignation (as the Gallican church has in fact heretofore resented) those impositions and corruptions which are attributable, not to the Fathers, but to the Bishops of Rome, and in which popery—if we use the designation with any pertinence, really consists.

Our times are times of irresistible progression, in every path on which movement takes place at all. Ecclesiastical research, once set on foot (in France or elsewhere), once gone into with eagerness, and undertaken by men who are commencing their professional career, will not, as we venture to predict, come to a stand at any point of arbitrary limitation; but will go as far as it can go:—it will reach the real or natural boundary of the ground within which it is carried on. French science, French historical learning, are not now sleepy, inert, or superstitiously timid; but are bold, persevering, and exact. French ecclesiastical learning, reared in the same schools, will partake of the same spirit, and will hold a similar course:—it will pursue its objects, and will overtake them. And while, in this country, we are going round about, feeling our way in the dark, a very few competent to take their part in any such inquiries, and more deprecating them as pernicious or idle;—while, in England, we are very likely to reap only new embarrassments from our inadequate researches into Christian antiquity, it may be predicted, as a not improbable event, that the French ecclesiastical scholars, less encumbered in fact than ourselves, less beset, and not distracted by the foresight of secular and political consequences, attached to these pursuits, may get fairly ahead of us, and become our masters. The Germans, as every body knows, have long since done so in whatever is purely erudite and critical—in whatever relates to the historical interpretation of the sacred text; and as, in times gone by, we have looked to the French ecclesiastical compilers and historians, as to the only men who were thoroughly conversant with the subject, so may we again have to go to our neighbours for the result of their independent and scholastic inquiries concerning the doctrine and polity of the early church.

To themselves, these inquiries, as they are not likely to be cut short, can hardly fail to be in the highest degree beneficial; and the probable consequences it might not be very difficult to anticipate. This, however, is a subject we must not here pursue. We might perhaps wish something else for the clergy of France than that they should give themselves to the painful perusal of the Greek and Latin divines. But He who "leadeth the blind, often, in a way that they know not," toward the fulness of truth, may be preparing, even now, happy changes for France, in this very path. Or should nothing further or better be the result, what protestant would not heartily rejoice to know that the superstitions of Gregory I, of Gregory VII, and of Gregory IX, were giving way, among our neighbours, to the superstititious Christianity, albeit, of Chrysostom, Cyprian, and Tertullian?

In connection with the topic here adverted to, a consideration is suggested by Pascal's usage (common to Romanist writers) and which he adheres to, as well in his Thoughts, as in the Provincial Letters, of making all his quotations from Scripture in the Latin of the Vulgate. Be it remembered that, when stating his reasons for adopting a lively and popular style, in the Provincial Letters, he plainly avows that he wished to gain the ear of the people at large;—of the unlearned and of women; and he felt that he should have failed in this object, had he written gravely and scholastically. We have his own confession then, that he wrote for all. But now to have allowed the people, through the medium of his pages, to have heard our Lord and his apostles speaking of salvation in the vernacular dialect, would have been tantamount to heresy: it would have been to countenance the abominations of Wickliffe, Luther, Calvin, Tindal. Pascal did not forget that the intention of that stupendous miracle which first declared the promised presence of the Spirit with the apostles, was to allow every man to hear "the words of life in the tongue in which he was born." But the Romish church had thought fit to contravene the Holy Ghost, and to reverse, by her decrees, the will of the ascended Saviour. The church therefore, not the Lord, the Pope, not the Holy Ghost, man, not God, was to be obeyed; and here is one of the most enlightened and pious of Romanists yielding obedience to the impious restrictions, and giving the sign of his approbation of the Romish practice of denying the Scriptures to the people. Let it be so. Pascal and his contemporaries have long ago fulfilled their course. But how is this main article of the Romish despotism likely to be thought of in the present day, and when it comes to be seen broadly opposed to the authority and opinion of the Fathers, one and all? Men of vigorous minds, breathing the atmosphere of intellectual independence, when they come, in the course of their daily studies, to meet with proofs, fresh and pointed, of the recentness, as well as of the deliberate wickedness of the papal innovations, are surely not unlikely to conceive and to cherish a burning resentment against the usurpation altogether. May they not—we mean the intelligent and erudite French clergy, come to say, 'We will betake ourselves to ancient Christianity, and rid ourselves of the puerile superstitions, and the degrading ordinances of the middle ages?'

While, on the one hand, the Scriptures, whether the clergy will it or not, are creeping on in Frauce, and are coming into all hands, they themselves are finding, on the pages of the authorized doctors of their church, the most strenuous exhortations, addressed to the people—to men and to women, to peruse the inspired writings. A volume of such passages might soon be gathered from those of the Fathers whom Rome herself has canonized. Or let the French clergy confine themselves, in this particular, to their own Hiliary of Poictiers, who, in an age as enlightened and as pure surely as that of Innocent III and St. Dominic, lost no occasion on which to urge upon all the diligent study of Scripture. But should it once come to this, that the clergy grant that, what the Fathers, one and all, allow and recommend, and what the spirit of the times calls for, is no longer rightfully to be refused; our neighbours may then think and say what they please of the English and German Reformers; so that they do but read the Bible themselves, and promote its circulation among their people.

Pascal himself, in a tract to which we have not as yet referred—"a comparison between the Christians of the early ages, and those of the present times;" indicates the sense he had of the greatness of the changes that had come upon the professedly Christian world; and as, in relation to physical science, he held a clue which, if he had pursued it, would have brought him soon upon the solid ground, and the open field of modern philosophy, so in this tract, and elsewhere, he incidentally throws out a hint which, had he followed it up, would have set him clear of the errors of the papacy. France, if her Pascal did not, has trod even steps with England on the walks of science: may she soon do so, although he did not, on the path of heavenly truth!