that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption. The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of his existence--that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lache, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic eclairs of divine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out for one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh precipices, of threatening heights and depths--the depths of his own nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords: Nous sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous condamnes. Ce qui y parait (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque ni une exclusion totale ni une presence manifeste de divinite, mais la presence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a recurrent favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractere. In this world of abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing short of sanctity. En Jesus Christ toutes les contradictions sont accordees. Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle autre religion n'a propose de se hair. La seule religion contraire a la nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait toujours ete.