revelation alone answers to all man’s necessities. Christ has not only proclaimed a higher truth to man, which man is bound to accept under penalties of default. This tone is also found sometimes, but comparatively seldom. The prevailing note is, that there is an admirable fitness between the two—the mysteries of human nature witnessing to the divine veracity of the Gospel, and the Gospel again holding the only key to these mysteries, and the only power of unravelling them and restoring them to their divine original. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “is for all men; Moses for one people.” “The knowledge of God without a knowledge of our misery produces pride; that of our misery without God leads to despair. The knowledge of Jesus is the means by which we at once find God and our misery.” “Without Jesus Christ man is sunk in vice and misery. . . . In Him is all our virtue and felicity.”
Of the more directly apologetic ‘Pensées’ of Pascal there are many of great significance and interest, slight as may be the value of his general historical argument, so far as this can be traced. Wherever he trusts to his own clear judgment and profound penetration, he throws out sentences weighty with meaning, and capable of being expanded into trains of argument. Our shortening space warns us that our quotations must come to an end; but the reader may thank us for drawing his attention to the following:—