y. Pascal, intimate, like
many another fine intellect of the day, with the Port-Royalists, was
Arnauld's friend, and it belonged to the ardour of his genius, at least
as he was then, to be a very active friend. He took up the pen as
other chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, and showed
himself a master of the art of fence therewith. His delicate exercise
of himself with that weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all
the world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French language
in prose.

Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of soul
from all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they turn to
the "Letters," to find him treating questions, as serious for the
friends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically, with a
but half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at being
unskilled in them and no theologian. He does not allow us to forget
that he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, almost
avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal distinctions and
suppositions that can never be verified. The world in general, indeed,
se paye des paroles. That saying belongs to Pascal, and [64] he uses
it with reference to the Jesuits and their favourite expression of
"sufficient grace." In the earliest "Letters" he creates in us a
feeling that, however orthodox one's intention, it is scarcely possible
to speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed by religious
people without heresy at some unguarded point. The suspected
proposition of Arnauld, it is admitted by one of his foes, "would be
Catholic in the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld." "The truth," as it
lay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a thing so delicate that
"pour peu qu'on s'en retire, on tombe dans l'erreur; mais cette erreur
est si deliee, que, pour peu qu'on s'en eloigne, on se trouve dans la
verite."

Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with which
such distinctions are drawn, by Pascal's friends as well as by their
foes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian by
profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things he
deals with--the things "which eye hath not seen" pressing into the
secrets of God's sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, He
differs with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted from
the poorest sort of men's dealings with each other, from the trader, or