y. You could feel that his was a
powerful individuality which faith kept under due control, but which
ecclesiastical discipline had not crushed. He was a saint, but had
very little of the priest and nothing of the Sulpician about him. He
did violence to the prime rule of the Company, which is to renounce
anything approaching talent and originality, and to be pliant to the
discipline which enjoys a general mediocrity.

M. Pinault had at first been professor of mathematics in the
university. In associating himself with studies which, in our
view, are incompatible with faith in the supernatural and fervent
catholicism, he did no more than M. Cauchy, who was at once a
mathematician of the first order and a more fervent believer than
many members of the Academy of Sciences who are noted for their piety.
Christianity is alleged to be a supernatural historical fact. The
historical sciences can be made to show--and to my mind, beyond the
possibility of contradiction--that it is not a supernatural fact, and
that there never has been such a thing as a supernatural fact. We do
not reject miracles upon the ground of _a priori_ reasoning, but upon
the ground of critical and historical reasoning, we have no difficulty
in proving that miracles do not happen in the nineteenth century, and
that the stones of miraculous events said to have taken place in our
day are based upon imposture and credulity. But the evidence in favour
of the so-called miracles of the last three centuries, or even of
those in the Middle Ages, is weaker still; and the same may be said
of those dating from a still earlier period, for the further back one
goes, the more difficult does it become to prove a supernatural fact.
In order thoroughly to understand this, you must have been accustomed
to textual criticism and the historical method, and this is just what
mathematics do not give. Even in our own day, we have seen an eminent
mathematician fall into blunders which the slightest knowledge of
historical science would have enabled him to avoid. M. Pinault's
religious belief was so keen that he was anxious to become a priest.
He was allowed to do very little in the way of theology, and he was
at first attached to the science courses which in the programme of
ecclesiastical studies are the necessary accompaniment of the two
years of philosophy. He would have been out of place at St. Sulpice
with his lack of theological knowledge and the ardent mysticism of his
imag