rs,
that one comes across a modern mind so penetrated with its master's
moods; so coloured, so dyed, so ingrained with that particular spirit,
that intercourse with it implies actual contact with its archetype.

Such an encounter with the subtlest of Christian apologists has been
my own good fortune in my association with Mr. W. J. Williams,
the friend of Loisy and Tyrrel, and the interpreter, for modern piety,
of Pascal's deepest thoughts.

The superiority of Pascal over all other defenders of the faith is to be
looked for in the peculiar angle of his approach to the terrific
controversy--an angle which Newman himself, for all his serpentine
sagacity, found it difficult to retain.

Newman worked in a mental atmosphere singularly unpropitious to
formidable intellectual ventures, and one never feels that his
essentially ecclesiastical mind ever really grasped the human
plausibility of natural paganism. But Pascal went straight back to
Montaigne, and, like Pater's Marius under the influence of
Aristippus, begins his search after truth with a clean acceptance of
absolute scepticism.

Newman was sceptical too, but his peculiar kind of intellectual piety
lacked the imagination of Pascal. He could play, cleverly enough,
with hypothetical infidelity, and refute it, so to say, "in his study"
with his eye on the little chapel door; but there was a sort of refined
shrinking from the jagged edges of reality in his somewhat
Byzantine temperament which throws a certain suspicion of special
pleading over his crafty logic.

Newman argues like a subtle theologian who has been clever
enough to add to his "repertoire" a certain evasive mist of pragmatic
modernism, under the filmy and wavering vapours of which the
inveterate sacerdotalism of his temperament covers its tracks. But
with Pascal we get clean away from the poison-trail of the
obscurantist.

Pascal was essentially a layman. There was nothing priestly in his
mood; nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in his
conclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics;
and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversial
pettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of the true
planetary situation.

One feels that Newman under all conceivable circumstances was
bound to be a priest. There was priestliness writ large upon his
countenance. His manner, his tone, his beautiful style, with
something at once pleading and threate