also to shorten his life. This unfortunate tendency manifested itself some years before his death, and increased until the close of life. "We are told," says Rogers, in his fine essay on "The Genius and Writings of Pascal," not only that he lived on the plainest fare and performed the most menial offices for himself; not only that he practised the severest abstinence, and the most rigid devotions, but that he wore beneath his clothes a girdle of iron, with sharp points affixed to it; and that whenever he found his mind disposed to wander from religious subjects, or take delight in things around him, he struck the girdle with his elbow, and forced the sharp points of the iron into his side." And this morbid conscientiousness was carried so far, as finally to prevent him from showing any marks of affection towards those whom he loved most tenderly, lest they should love him in return more than they ought. They should not" says he, "attach themselves to me, for they ought to spend their time and strength in seeking after God, and pleasing him.”

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We cannot justify Pascal in these things. It is no stoical indifference to the earthly blessings which God has given, that he commands; they are not set as snares to catch us in our weakness, but rather to refresh and strengthen us for his service, as a wayside spring refreshes the weary traveller, and sends him forward hopefully again on his journey. We cannot but consider this asceticism, with the writer just quoted, as "indeed a proof of the truth which Pascal so passionately meditated upon, the 'greatness and the misery' of man ; his strength and his weakness; weakness in supposing that such perversion of all nature could ever be a dictate of duty; strength in performing, without wincing, a task so hard. The American Indian, bearing unmoved the torture of his enemies, exhibits not, we may rest assured, greater fortitude than Pascal, when, with such a heart as his, he received in silence the last ministrations of his devoted friends, and even declined, with cold and averted eye, the assiduities of their zealous love."

Pascal died at the early age of thirty-nine. Corneille said of him "Scarcely had he begun to live, yet what a name he has left!" In mathematics, polemics, and as a writer on spiritual religion, he left a reputation which any man might envy, and which few have equalled. For the French language he

accomplished great things; his facile pen moulding it into new forms of beauty, and proving its adaptability to serious as well as familiar themes.

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Pascal has been accused of misanthropy. The learned Cousin, has elaborately endeavored to convict him of this. His Essay on "Pascal as a Philosophic Sceptic," is given entire in the edition of Pascal's Works whose title stands at the head of this article, together with its able refutation by Rogers, entitled the "Genius and Writings of Pascal." But we think that any person reading carefully and interpreting honestly these Thoughts," and taking into account the circumstances in which they were written, cannot fail to acquit him of the charge of scepticism and misanthropy. We are to remember, as Rogers observes, that "they were mere notes for Pascal's own use, and were never intended to be published as they are. Many of them are altogether imperfect and undeveloped, some scarcely intelligible. It is impossible to tell with what modifications, and in what connection, they would have stood in the matured form which the master-mind hastily recording them for private reference, would ultimately have given them. Nay, there can scarcely be a doubt that many of them were mere objections which Pascal noted for refutation-not opinions to be maintained by him; and this in many places may be not obscurely inferred. Some are mere quotations from Montaigne and other authors, extracted for some unknown purpose, but not distinguished in these private memoranda from the writer's own expressions; so that the first editors of the 'Pensées' actually printed them in some cases as his. And lastly, some were dictated, in moments of sickness and pain, to an old domestic, who has scrawled them in a fashion which sufficiently shows that it is very possible that some errors may lie with the amanuensis."

With all this abatement, however, the "Thoughts" will remain as a monument of the genius and faith of their writer, and an earnest of the great things which had he lived he would have accomplished for the Church. It is a matter of rejoicing that a correct edition of these fragments has at last been presented to the world through the perseverance of two or three men whose reverence and love for Pascal has induced them to

spare no pains to clear his text from the false emendations and additions of the early editors. This has been reproduced in England by Mr. Wight, in most instances with great accuracy. Occasionally we may complain of a somewhat too strict adherence to the letter of the original; but this is an error in the safest direction. It is indeed almost impossible to preserve the sparkling, pointed style of Pascal, in the guise of another language; what in French is piquant and energetic, is apt to become in English, from the difference between the two languages, either commonplace or harsh, because the French use the dialect of conversation to express the most serious thoughts, while we, on the contrary, have, so to speak, a vocabulary for every class of subjects a religious dialect widely different from that which we employ for the affairs of this world. Amid the difficulties arising from this source, Mr. Wight has succeeded in giving us a faithful and often an elegant translation. To those who desire to read the "Thoughts" in the original, he recommends the Variorum" edition of Mr. Charles Louandre. Another recension of standard merit is the "Texte Authentique" of Ernest Havet: Paris, 1852.

Mr. Wight has arranged the "Thoughts" in twenty-five chapters. The first is entitled " Against the indifference of the Atheists," and was probably designed, as he intimates, to serve as a preface to the work which Pascal planned. Here he endeavors to prove that it is unnatural and criminal to neglect the inquiry into our nature and prospects, and concludes that "there are but two sorts of persons who can be called rational, either those that serve God with all their heart because they know Him; or those that seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him." The whole argument, though doubtless far inferior to what it would have been had Pascal lived to complete and revise it, is marked by great ability.

The next chapter is a collocation of the thoughts upon Pascal's favorite subject-"the greatness and misery of man,' and the "astonishing contradictions of his nature." We cannot forbear quoting the following justly admired passage. Pascal has been speaking of the littleness of man in comparison with the universe:

"What is man in the midst of the infinite? But to show him

another prodigy equally astonishing, let him seek in what he knows (to be) things the most minute; let a mite exhibit to him in the exceeding smallness of its body, parts incomparably smaller, limbs with joints, veins in these limbs, blood in these veins,* humors in this blood, globules in these humors, gases in these globules; let him, still dividing these last objects, exhaust his powers of conception, and let the ultimate object at which he can arrive, now be the subject of our discourse; he will think perhaps that this is the minutest atom of nature. I will show him therein a new abyss. I will picture to him not only the visible universe, but the conceivable immensity of nature in the compass of this abbreviation of an atom (dans l'enciente de cet atome imperceptible.) Let him view therein an infinity of worlds, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as the visible world; and on this earth animals, and in fine, mites, in which he will find again what the first have given; and still finding in the others the same thing, without end, and without repose, let him lose himself in these wonders, as astonishing in their littleness as the others in their magnitude; for who will not marvel that our body, which just before was not perceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the all, is now a colossus, a world, or rather an all, in comparison with the nothingness at which it is impossible to arrive?

"Whoever shall thus consider himself, will be frightened at himself, and observing himself suspended in the mass of matter allotted to him by nature, between these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, will tremble at the sight of these wonders; and I believe that his curiosity being changed into admiration he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.

"The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself miserable. A tree does not know itself miserable. It is then to be miserable to know ourselves miserable; but it is to be great to know that we are miserable. All these miseries even prove man's greatness. They are miseries of a great lord, miseries of a deposed king."

One of the finest among the "Thoughts" is the following; and Pascal has elaborated it with a degree of care which is not perceptible in most of these sketches or outlines of ideas:

"Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush him. A breath of air, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But were

*Pascal wrote according to the state of science in his day. At present the "mite" (ciron) is not supposed to possess a circulatory system as here described.

the universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the universe knows nothing of the advantage it has over him. consists, then, in thought. Our elevation must be not from space and duration, which we cannot fill. then, to think well; this is the principle of ethics :- Voilà le principe de la morale."

Our whole dignity derived from this, Let us endeavor,

It would extend this article beyond proper limits were we to quote one half of the striking thoughts which meet the eye in turning over the pages of this wonderful collection. It contains useful and deeply-pondered lessons on the "Vanity of Man," his "Inquietude," "Reason and Sentiment," in the chapters that precede those in which religion is more definitely the topic of Pascal's meditations. We can give but a few short speci

mens:

"We are not contented with the life that we have in ourselves, and in our own being; we wish to live, in the idea of others, an imaginary life, and we constrain ourselves for this end to put on appearances. We labor incessantly to adorn and sustain this imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we have either tranquillity, or generosity, or fidelity, we strive to make it known, in order to attach these virtues to this being of the imagination; we would sooner cast them off in reality than not to seem to have them; and we would willingly be cowards in order to preserve the reputation of being valiant." . . . "So great is the sweetness of glory that one loves whatever things it is attached to, even death."

One is reminded by this passage of Boileau's lines:

"Sans cesse on prend le masque, et quittant la nature,
On craint de se montrer sous sa propre figure;

Par là le plus sincère assez souvent déplaît,
Rarement un esprit ose être ce qu'il est."

"The mind of the supreme judge of the world" (man) "is not so independent as not to be liable to be disturbed by the least uproar that is made about him. It does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts; the creaking of a vane or pulley is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing in his ear; it is enough to render him incapable of sound judgment. If you are desirous that he should find the truth, drive away that insect, which suspends his reasoning powers, and frets that mighty mind