And so this great mind comes round once more to its central thought, that religion is born not of science, but of love and faith. Christianity appeared to Pascal divine—as the only true interpreter of human experience; and where this experience bore no witness to it, and found no blessing in it, the fault and the misery were its own. The divine light was not gone because men did not see it, when they were not willing to see it. This may seem a hard saying,—a paradox of faith rejoicing in its own illumination, rather than an utterance of reason challenging the world. But can a divine appeal ever go further? Christian apology has its own sphere, no less than science; and the evidence which the one desiderates is not the supreme life and power of the other. It may not on this account be the less satisfactory or the less rational when the whole life of humanity is looked at. If we ask ourselves, in conclusion, what is the chief charm of the ‘Pensées,’ we feel inclined to answer,—their touching reality. They are the utterances of one who thought not only deeply but passionately. A strange thrill of personal emotion runs through them all, animating them with vitality, even when one-sided or extravagant. One of his own countrymen {204} has said of Pascal that it was his mission to do for theology what Socrates did for philosophy—to bring it down from heaven to earth. And certainly there is the breathing movement as of a human heart through his whole writings. More than anything else, it is this vitality combined with his exquisite literary art which sets him above all his friends and contemporaries—Arnauld, De Saci, Le Maitre, Nicole, or Fontaine. Still, when we read the ‘Provincial Letters’ or the ‘Pensées,’ we feel ourselves in communion with a living writer who knew how to light up with an immortal touch both the follies of ecclesiasticism and the struggles of a solitary spirit after truth. The tenderness of a genuine insight mingles with all the sublimity and severe reserve of the thought, and so we get close to a true soul, distant as Pascal himself in some respects remains to us. The play of human feeling which we miss in the man moves in his writings, and touches our hearts with an ineffable sympathy, even when we remain unconvinced or unenlightened. END OF PASCAL. NOTES. {3} Lettres, Opuscules, et Mémoires de Madame Périer et de Jacqueline, Sœurs de Pascal, et de Marguerite Périer, sa nièce; publiés sur les Manuscrits originaux, par M. P. Faugère. Paris, 1845. {4a} Jacqueline Pascal, par M. Victor Cousin. Troisième éd. 1856. Lélut, L’Amulette de Pascal. Paris, 1846. {4b} Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal. Tom. ii. iii. Mr Beard, in his two volumes on Port Royal, gives an excellent sketch of Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal, in which he has made a diligent use of all the recent French authorities on the subject. {4c} British Quarterly Review, August 1850.