ligion for
which he had exchanged so much; that the sense of acceptance, of
assurance, had come to him; that for him the Spouse had ever penetrated
the veil of the ordinary routine of the means of grace; [82] nothing
that corresponded as a matter of clear personal intercourse of the very
senses to the greatness of his surrender--who had emptied himself of
all other things. Besides, there was some not wholly-explained delay
in his reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. It was
brought to him just in time--"Voici celui que vous avez tant
desire!"--the ministrant says to the dying man. Pascal was then aged
thirty-nine--an age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to
genius.

Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly measure but as the
outcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at
ease. We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of that
sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of mind in
a human body. Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure pain rather
than thoughts--those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their
depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity,
just beneath one's feet or at one's side. Reading them, so modern still
are those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that one seems
to witness the mental seed-sowing of the next two centuries, and
perhaps more, as to those matters with which he concerns himself.
Intuitions of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as the
final considerations of the natural man, as a religious inquirer on
doubt and faith, and their place in [83] things. Listen now to some of
these "Thoughts" taken at random: taken at first for their brevity.
Peu de chose nous console, parce que peu de chose nous afflige. Par
l'espace l'univers me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point: par la
pensee je le comprends. Things like these put us en route with Pascal.
Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de les
appliquer. The great ascetic was always hard on amusements, on mere
pastimes: Le divertissement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait
arriver insensiblement a la mort. Nous perdons encore la vie avec
joie, pourvu qu'on en parle. On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie
(in a portrait) qu'en accordant toutes nos contrarietes. L'homme n'est
qu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau
pensant. Il ne faut pas qu