affirm the improbable, to believe in what seems incredible, is much more meritorious. Our courage rises in proportion as our intelligence becomes humble; the more absurd one is the greater one is—_credo quia ineptum_; the more difficult the task, the greater the merit. The strength of our faith is estimated, in the mysticism of Pascal, by the weakness of its “reasons.” The ideal, on this theory, would be to possess no more than the metaphysical minimum of reason for belief, the weakest conceivable of motives, a mere nothing; that is to say, one should be attached to the supreme object of one’s faith by the slenderest of bonds. The Albigensian priests, the _parfaits_, wear a simple white cord around their waists as an emblem of their vow; all mankind wears this cord, and it is in reality more solid and often heavier than any chain. [Sidenote: Complete intellectual rest incident to faith.] Scepticism tends toward a complete intellectual indifference with regard to all things; dogmatic faith produces a partial indifference, an indifference limited to certain points, determined once for all; it is no longer anxious on these heads, but rests and delights in established dogma. The sceptic and the man of faith abandon themselves thus to a more or less extensive abstinence from thought. Religious faith is a determination to suspend the flight of the imagination, to limit the sphere of thought. We all know the Oriental legend that the world is held up by an elephant, which stands on a tortoise, which floats on a sea of milk. The believer must always refrain from asking what supports the sea of milk? He must never notice a point of which there is no explanation; he must constantly repeat to himself the abortive incomplete idea that has been given him without daring to recognize that it is incomplete. In a street through which I pass every day, a blackbird whistles the same melodic phrase; the phrase is incomplete, ends abruptly, and for years I have heard him lift his voice, deliver himself of his truncated song, and stop with a satisfied air, with no need to complete his musical fragment, which I never hear without a feeling of impatience. It is thus with the true believer; accustomed as he is in the most important questions to dwell within the limits of the customary, without any curiosity about the beyond, he sings his monotonous little note without dreaming that it lacks anything—that his phrase is as clipped as his wings are, and that the narrow world of his belief is not the universe. [Sidenote: Wilful blindness of faith.]