How long Pascal’s pious elation continued is not said, nor have we any further details of his religious life at Port Royal. He never absolutely took up his abode there as one of the Solitaries, and could therefore say in his sixteenth Provincial Letter, without more than an innocent equivocation, that he “did not belong to Port Royal.” He was still found there, however, in the beginning of the following year (1655), when the affair of M. Arnauld and the Sorbonne was approaching its crisis, and the idea of his famous letters was started in a meeting, to be afterwards mentioned, between him and Arnauld and Nicole. After this, during the publication of the ‘Letters,’ Pascal seems chiefly to have resided in Paris, probably with a view to the greater facilities he enjoyed there in prosecuting his assaults upon the Jesuits, which continued till the spring of 1657. During the following year he was busy with the great idea of a work in defence of religion, suggested partly by his own intellectual activity, but partly also by a special incident at Port Royal which made a great impression upon him. This was the famous “miracle” of the Holy Thorn. Madame Périer’s daughter, Marguerite Périer—the same to whom we are indebted for interesting memorials of her uncle’s life—had become, with her sister, a pupil at Port Royal. She suffered from an apparently incurable disease of the eye, _fistula lachrymalis_. On a sudden she was reported to be entirely cured, and the cure was attributed to the touch of a relic which had been brought to the abbey by a priest,—a supposed thorn from the crown of Christ. It is remarkable that the Mère Angélique was somewhat slow of belief as to the “miracle,” and that she marvelled the world should make so much of it. But it secured the credence of Pascal, and became a great fact in the history of Port Royal, staying for a time the hand of persecution, and pointing, as its friends believed, to the visible interposition of heaven. How could the accusations against Port Royal be true, seeing what God Himself had done on its behalf? “This place, which men say is the devil’s temple, God makes His house. Men declare that its children must be taken out of it, and God heals them there. They are threatened with all the furies; God loads them with His favours.” This was Pascal’s own language on the subject, {97} and there can be no doubt that the supposed miracle deeply affected him. He was “sensibly touched,” it is said, “by such a grace, regarding it as virtually done to himself, seeing it was done to one so near to him in kindred, and who was his spiritual daughter in baptism.” He was penetrated by a great joy, and much occupied by the thought of what had happened, and the general subject of miracles. There was in this manner awakened in him “the extreme desire of employing himself on a work in refutation of the principles and false reasonings of the atheists.” “He