CHAPTER VI. THE ‘PENSÉES.’

“Even when Epictetus had discovered the right way, he could only say to man, ‘You follow a wrong one.’  He shows that there is another, but he does not lead to it. . . .  Jesus Christ alone leads to it—*via*, *veritas*. page 202“Jesus Christ has spoken great things so simply that they seem to have cost Him little thought—and yet so fitly that we see well what His thought was.”  [This combination of clearness and *naïveté* is admirable.] “The apostles were either deceived or deceivers; either supposition is full of difficulty. “What right have they to say, ‘It is impossible that we should rise again’?  Which is the more difficult to be—to be born, or to be raised from the dead?  Is it less difficult to come into being than to return to being?  Custom (experience) renders the one easy to us; the want of custom makes the other seem impossible.  But *this is a popular way of judging*. “Who taught the evangelists the qualities of a truly heroic soul, that they should paint it to such perfection in Jesus Christ?  Why have they made Him weak in His agony?  Did they not know how to describe a death of fortitude?  Assuredly; for it is the same St Luke paints St Stephen’s death as so much braver than that of Jesus Christ.  They have made Him capable of fear before the necessity of death had come, then entirely calm and brave.  But when they show Him in trouble, the trouble comes from Himself; in the face of men He remains unmoved. “The highest achievement of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which surpass its powers. “If we submit everything to reason, our religion would have nothing mysterious or supernatural.  If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. “There are two extremes—to exclude reason, and to admit only reason. “It is your own consent, and the steady voice of your own reason, and not that of others, which must make you believe. “If antiquity was the rule of faith, the ancients were without a rule. “Let them say what they will, it must be confessed that the Christian religion is something astonishing.  ‘That is because you were born in it,’ they say.  So far from this, I page 203am on my guard against it on this very account, lest this incline me unduly to it.  But though I was born in it, the facts are not the less as I find them.”