This last deep utterance of Pater’s has a strange significance when taken side by side with the fact so often stated that he was thinking of the possibility of receiving Anglican ordination. There could not possibly be a greater mistake than this supposition. Perhaps, indeed, there was a region of his mind in which the idea appealed to him, but deeper down, in a secret chamber of thought, which in his writings at all events he did not often visit, lay that consciousness of the hard, dark, bare truth which, if a man once truly apprehends, prevents him from figuring as a partisan, except through a certain sophistry, on the side of authoritative religion. This is the truth, disguise it as we will, that religion in its purest form is not a solution of the world’s mystery, but a working theory of morals. For all religions, even Christianity itself, tend to depend upon certain assumptions, such as the continuance, in some form or other, of our personal identity after death, of which no scientific evidence is forthcoming. We may assume it, yielding to a passionate intuition, but nothing can prevent it from being an assumption, an intuition, which may perhaps transcend reason, but cannot wholly satisfy it. And thus, however impassioned, however transcendent that intuition may be, there must always remain a certain element of doubt, in all sincere minds, as to the absolute certainty of the assumption. Thus there must lie, in all reasoning men’s hearts, a streak of agnosticism. The triumph of faith can never, until faith melts into certainty, be of the same quality as the triumph of reason; and it is upon the proportion of doubt to faith in any man’s mind that his religious attitude depends. There is little question as to which way Pater’s sympathies and hopes inclined; but this essay clearly reveals that the doubt was there. He touches with deep sympathy the strange and sad withdrawal of Pascal from the world; his attempt, under the pressure of a painful and unmanning disease, to find solace in asceticism, renunciation, and the practice of austere pieties; it seems strange to Pater to find that Pascal never fell under the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church, but found “a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness, in them.” “He seems,” he adds, “to have little sense of the beauty of holiness,” but to be absorbed by a “sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy.”