But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minute pieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the wholeness of Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his immense sincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of the Middle Age, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations of Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. In Pascal they are original, and have all their seriousness. Que je n'en sois [80] jamais separe--pas separe eternellement, he repeats, or makes that strange sort of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for him. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. It is table rase he is trying to make of himself, that He might reign there absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to think, had made and blest all those things he declined to accept. Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated into the renuncient life. He could not, had he wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift--literally a gift he might have thought it not to be buried but accounted for--the gift of le beau dire, of writing beautifully. "Il avoit renonce depuis longtemps aux sciences purement humains." To him who had known them so well, and as if by intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms of service might well have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellous in our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites heures, the cxviii. of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts now as but a variety of le neant and vanity of things. He no longer records, therefore, the mathematical apercus that may visit him; and in his scruples, his suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as precisely an inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.