Again in “Vézelay” (1894) we have a study in contrast, of a “majestic, immoveable” church, which, with “its masses of almost unbroken masonry, its _inertia_,” seems to have a certain kinship with imperial Rome. Its almost savage character, he says, is hardly relieved by a great band of energetic, realistic, coarsely executed sculpture, in which demons make merry over the punishment of wickedness: “Bold, crude, original, the work indicates delight in the power of reproducing fact, curiosity in it, but little or no sense of beauty.” But the end was at hand, although there was no hint or foreshadowing of it. Never had Pater been more tranquil, serene, contented, than in these last months. Increasing years, without diminishing strength, concentration, or intellectual force, had brought him nothing but what was good; the respect, the regard, the devotion, of friends; the consciousness that he had now a perfect control of his art and its resources. He had many designs and schemes for books that should be written, and there seemed no reason why he should not have many years before him of simple life and congenial activity; and so we come to his last utterance. The essay on “Pascal” has a deep significance among the writings of Pater; it contains, thinly veiled under the guise of criticism, some of his deepest thoughts on the great mystery of life—freewill and necessity—and his views of orthodox theology. It is true that he is nominally justifying Pascal and confuting the Jesuits; but there is a passionate earnestness about his line of argument which shows only too clearly that he was doing what it suited his natural reticence to do—fighting like Teucer under the shield of Ajax, and taking a part, an eager part, in the controversy between Liberalism and Authority. Moreover, it is his last work; the work on which he was engaged in the last hours of his life; the essay, indeed, never received the last touches of that careful hand, and though substantially complete, it breaks off in the middle of a sentence. This fact—that it was his last deliberate utterance—gives it a special significance; even before he had said his last word on the mystery of life, he knew all that there is to know. To take the theological side of the essay first, speaking of Pascal’s half-contemptuous attempts to arrive at the true definition of theological phrases, Pater thus comments upon the situation:— “Pascal’s charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.”