ir manifestations in the
universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of
the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not
bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious
doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in
a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human
impressions. There is a _Meditation on the Faith_, including a _Prayer_,
among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of
Condorcet's incredible account of the circumstances of its composition,
that it is the expression of what was at the time a sincere feeling.[17]
It is, however, rather the straining and ecstatic rhapsody of one who
ardently seeks faith, than the calm and devout assurance of him who
already possesses it. Vauvenargues was religious by temperament, but he
could not entirely resist the intellectual influences of the period. The
one fact delivered him from dogma and superstition, and the other from
scoffing and harsh unspirituality. He saw that apart from the question
of the truth or falsehood of its historic basis, there was a balance to
be struck between the consolations and the afflictions of the faith.[18]
Practically he was content to leave this balance unstruck, and to pass
by on the other side. Scarcely any of his maxims concern religion. One
of these few is worth quoting, where he says: 'The strength or weakness
of our belief depends more on our courage than our light; not all those
who mock at auguries have more intellect than those who believe in
them.'[19]

The end came in the spring of 1747, when Vauvenargues was no more than
thirty-two. Perhaps, in spite of his physical miseries, these two years
in Paris were the least unhappy time in his life. He was in the great
centre where the fame which he longed for was earned and liberally
awarded. A year of intercourse with so full and alert and brilliant a
mind as Voltaire's, must have been more to one so appreciative of mental
greatness as Vauvenargues, than many years of intercourse with
subalterns in the Regiment of the King. With death, now known to be very
near at hand, he had made his account before. 'To execute great things,'
he had written in a maxim which gained the lively praise of Voltaire, 'a
man must live as though he had never to die.'[20] This mood was common
among the Greeks and Romans; but the religion which Europe accepted in
the time of its d