ning, and a kind of feminine
attenuation in its vibrant periods, bears witness to this.

Stripped of his cassock and tossed into the world's "hurly-burly,"
Newman would have drawn back into himself in Puritan dismay,
and with Puritan narrowness and sourness would have sneered at the
feet of the dancers. There was, at bottom, absolutely nothing in
Newman of the clear-eyed human sweetness of the Christ of the
Gospels; that noble, benignant, tolerant God, full of poetic
imagination, whose divine countenance still looks forth from the
canvasses of Titian.

Newman's piety, at best, was provincial, local, distorted. His Christ
is the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; not
the Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with his
disciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among the
crowds of the street like a royal uncrowned king.

It is a mistake to regard Pascal as a Protestant. It is equally a mistake
to press hard upon his Catholicity. He was indeed too tragically
preoccupied with the far deeper question as to whether faith in
Christ is possible at all, to be limited to these lesser disputes.

His quarrel with the Jesuits was not essentially a theological quarrel.
It was the eternal quarrel between the wisdom and caution and
casuistry of the world and the uncompromising vision of the poet
and prophet.

Nietzsche would never have singled out Pascal as his most
formidable enemy if the author of "The Thoughts" had been nothing
but a theological controversialist. What gives an eternal value to
Pascal's genius, is that it definitely cleared the air. It swept aside all
blurring and confusing mental litter, and left the lamentable stage of
the great dilemma free for the fatal duel.

Out of the immense darkness of the human situation, that forlorn
stage rises. The fearful spaces of the godless night are its roof, and
row above row, tier above tier in its shadowy enclosure, the troubled
crowds of the tribes of men wait the wavering issue of the contest.
Full on the high stage in this tragic theatre of the universe Pascal
throws the merciless searchlight of his imaginative logic, and the
rhythm of the duality of man's fate is the rhythm of the music of his
impassioned utterances.

The more one dreams over the unique position which Pascal has
come to occupy, the more one realises how few writers there are
whose imagination is large enough to grapple with the sublime
horror of being bo