This passage conveys very clearly at once the gist of Pascal’s philosophy and the chief merit of his line of Christian apology. The two cannot be separated. They run constantly into one another. He was a Christian apologist in so far as he was a Christian philosopher; and those who reject his line of Christian defence, will also reject his whole mode of thought. To him the only solution of human perplexity in thought and life is Christ. He is the “object and centre of all things, in whom alone all contradictions are reconciled.” This is the conclusion of his intelligence, and not of his despair. Whatever may be the traces of scepticism in his intellectual nature, it is doing him great injustice to represent his acceptance of Christianity as a mere refuge from uncertainty. He is a totally different man from Huet, with whom Cousin has ventured to compare him in this respect. He never dallies on the surface; mere traditionalism has but a slight hold of him. He is a Christian not because he has been taught Christianity, or because the Church as a divine institution claims his allegiance. All these influences may have affected him, and given a turn to his mind; but they do not touch the essence of his thoughts. Anything he does say of the external claims of Christianity has but little weight. It is out of the depths of his own spiritual experience that his faith is born. It is a voice within him, a conflicting cry of weakness and aspiration going up everywhere from humanity, that find their answer in Christ. There is the enigma of man on the one side, to him otherwise hopeless, and Christ on the other, holding the keys of the enigma in His hand. The solution appeared to him perfect, according to his study and analysis of the problem—the twofoldness that he found in man, of divine dignity on the one hand, and frivolous, sensual degradation on the other. Both facts, he says, are equally clear and certain. Man’s fall from a state of divine innocence alone explains them; and the Gospel alone recognises the one side as well as the other of human nature, and provides a Power capable of restoring its true balance and rectifying all its disorder. He felt in himself the might of this power healing all the wounds of his own heart, and binding up the shreds of his Christian efforts “to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Whether we agree with all his analyses, or recognise all the adaptations which he describes, it is impossible not to feel that they were living to him, and that he saw in Christianity not merely a refuge for the disappointed heart, but a true philosophy of life—the only “sure and sound philosophy,” as Justin Martyr had found long before him.