uivering lash seemed, as he cracked it above the
moaning waters, to summon the hidden monsters of the depths to
rise to the surface. I could not see in my dream the face of this figure,
for dark clouds kept sweeping across his head; but the sense of his
ferocious loneliness took possession of me, and since then I have
found it increasingly difficult to confine his image to mild
Jansenistic heresies, ironic girdings at Jesuitical opponents,
philosophic strolls with evangelical friends.

What Pascal does is a thing that, curiously enough, is very rarely
done, even by great metaphysical writers; I mean the bringing home
to the mind, without any comfortable illusive softenings of the stark
reality, of what life really implies in its trenchant outlines. To do this
with the more complete efficacy, he goes back to Montaigne and
uses the scepticism of Montaigne as his starting point.

The Christian faith, in order to be a thing of beauty and dignity,
must necessarily have something _desperate_ about it, something of
the terrible sweat and tears of one who wrestles with the ultimate
angel. Easy-going Christianity, the Christianity of plump prelates
and argumentative presbyters, is not Christianity at all. It is simply
the "custom of the country" greased with the unction of professional
interests.

One remembers how both Schopenhauer and Heine sweep away the
Hegelian Protestantism of their age and look for the spirit of Christ
in other quarters.

That so tremendous a hope, that so sublime a chance should have
appeared at all in the history of the human race is a thing to wonder
at; and Pascal, coming upon this chance, this hope, this supreme
venture, from the depths of a corrosive all-devouring scepticism,
realised it at its true value.

Hung between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, frozen by
the mockery of two eternities, this "quintessence of dust" which is
ourselves, cries aloud to be delivered from the body of its living
death.

A reed that thinks! Could there anywhere be found a better
description of what we are? Reed-like we bow ourselves to the
winds of the four horizons--reed-like we murmur repetitions of the
music of forest and sea--reed-like we lift our heads among the dying
stalks of those who came before us--reed-like we wither and droop
when our own hour comes--but with it all, we _think!_

Pascal looking at the face of the world sees evidence on all sides of
the presence of something blighti