macy with the abstract sciences. It might have been expected also, that his love of physical philosophy would rather have inclined him to that class of arguments for the truth of religion which are founded on the phenomena of visible nature. Quite otherwise. When he becomes a theological writer, he strikes out a perfectly new track. He alters his weapons as well as his warfare. The ardent votary of natural philosophy altogether forsakes the material world, to bury himself in the world of the human mind. The hard geometer adopts a style of argument, remarkable indeed for perspicuity and conclusiveness, but still more for pathos and fervour,'-a style addressed to the heart as well as the reason, simple as truth, and impassioned as poetry. Some writers of the present day have represented D'Alembert as remarkable among all the men of science that ever flourished, for an assemblage of opposite qualities; for the union of the higher gifts of the mind with its lighter and softer graces,-of profound and original thinking with simplicity and even playfulness of the contemplative habits of a student with a taste for social enjoyment,-and of a severe and laborious mathematical faculty with great warmth of feeling and vigour of eloquence. We would not grudge D'Alembert his due praise; but it seems to us that Pascal would have been a preferable example. Were we called on to name a mental combination, and a form Where every god did seem to set his seal, this would have been among the foremost names in our catalogue. It is not perhaps generally known of Pascal, though it amply appears in the most authentic accounts of him, that his social qualities and colloquial powers were of a highly distinguished order. He was, as a companion, delightful, till towards the close of his life, when his con CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 155. scientious struggles after a greater abstraction of the affections than seems attainable (or perhaps is even allowable) in the present stage of our existence, assisted, we doubt not, by the wretched state of his health, had the effect of rendering his manners somewhat cold and indifferent. Even this was an abatement, merely of sociableness,-not of benevolence, which glowed in his heart with ever-increasing warmth till its last beat. His intellectual faculties and acquirements are better known and appreciated. He was born a mathematician and an analyst. In experimental philosophy, his sagacity was only equalled by a modesty and caution which formed a striking and amiable contrast to the presumptuous hardihood of his contemporary, Dés Cartes. Condorcet, indeed, appears to consider the rashness and dogmatism of Des Cartes as a more useful quality than the wariness of Pascal, or at least as having in fact produced more good. Accidentally, there can be no doubt that the bold contempt of Des Cartes for received opinions, and his confident reliance on himself, proved highly beneficial to the progress of science by demolishing established errors and making room for a sounder philosophy. But, if Condorcet intended to represent this fortunate audacity as in itself more respectable than that cautious and accurate examination of evidence, and that distrust of novelty which distinguished Pascal, or even as, in ordinary times, a more serviceable and successful can only say that a professed disqualification for a philosopher, we ciple of the Newtonian philosophy ought to have judged better. Mathematical and physical science, however, formed but the smaller part of Pascal's glory. Having as tonished the world by his philoso phical proficiency and discoveries, while at the same time the intense application with which he studied absolutely ruined his health, he, in 5 B mind have been, of which the mere rough and formless, sketches have produced such a performance!" Surely, here was a wonderful constellation of excellencies, even if, to so many talents and accomplishments, that might singly have made other men famous, there had not been added that one qualification, without which the highest of authorities assures us that the command of all mysteries and all knowledge could profit us nothing. But we are losing sight of what is more peculiarly our present tast. The argument from the nature of man, powerfully and commandingly as it is stated by Pascal, has not perhaps all the completeness to which he would have wrought it had his life been spared. A philosopher himself, he has finely painted the agonies of the human understanding in its search after truth': and has given some striking sketches of the general imperfection of hu• man knowledge. He has represeated also, with great force, the moral contrarieties of the soul of the confused contest be his thirty-third year, burst into notice as the author of the Provincial Letters. This work was written without any model, for indeed the French had at that time no great writers whatsoever; but it has itself become a model to all succeed. ing times. All competent judges, of whatever sect or party, have vied together in its praises. Though of a controversial nature, and employed on metaphysical questions of great subtilty, it exhibits all the graces of fine writing; and Voltaire himself confesses that it at once rivals the wit of Moliere and the sublimity of Bossuet. Even this work, however, thus high and various in excellence, is not that from which the reputation of its author has been principally derived. His life was now hasting to a close. He died at the age of thirty-nine, and the three or four last years of his life were one succession of the acutest sufferings. Yet this short and harassed interval sufficed, not only to exhibit him once more with undiminished power in the field of mathematics, but to produce an in-man; valuable, though unfinished, monu-tween conscience and evil inclinament of his capacity in an entirely tions; the mixture of a moral new department. In the work sense with moral incapacity. Even which forms the more immediate on these points, however, had the subject of the present article, he ap-author lived to complete his design, peared, no longer as a controversial, he would probably have entered but as a contemplative, moralist; into a far greater variety of detail. no longer as the advocate of a par- But the greatest defect seems to beticular body of Christians, but as long to that part of his argument the champion of Christianity itself. which is founded on the vanity of The merits of this work have com- human bappiness; and, as Voltaire pelled the admiration of those most has not failed, in his annotations, to inclined to ridicule its object and take advantage of this imperfection, exaggerate its defects. It is pathe-we shall perhaps be forgiven for tic, profound," and sublime, com-remarking on it rather more partiposed in the simplest style yet abounding with examples of that sage and serene eloquence which befits an ambassador of Heaven. It seems to us the perfection of the deliberative style on a great subject. Yet it is a mere collection of frag ments, the casual product of short of intervals of extreme pain; and, as "M. Renouard excellently observes, "How extraordinary must that - cularly i real! dood day codz The desires of happiness, says Pascal, is the single motive of human action; yet no man is happy. From the earliest times, no man has attained that blessing, for which alone every man has sighed. All seek it, and all complain that their search has been fruitless; princes band subjects, nobles and commoners, old and young, strong and weak, learned and unlearned, healthy and sick, of all countries and in all ages. All have an inextinguishable idea of an unattainable good; all commence with the same hopes, to end in the same disappointment; and, by this coutrast between that which they are fortned to seek, and that which they are doomed to find, illustrate at once the grandeur of their origin, and the depth of their degradation. rated exercise of imagination, from poetry and from music, from the charms of rural retirement, from the social and benevolent affections, and, above all, from the charities of domestic life, We are, indeed, fatally prone to abuse these gifts; but the gifts themselves must not therefore be slighted or undervaslued. Amidst the signs of wrath and penal misery by which we are on all sides surrounded, these boun ties seem scattered as memorials of Him who does not willingly afflict even the unthankful and evil, who considers punishment as his strange 12 9 The dark view given of human life in this representation, though sadly just on the whole, yet seems to 'require some little qualification. * There are indeed those who will re-work, and who is pleased still to cognize the likeness'at once, and recognize it the sooner for its sombre colours. This gloomy portraiture needs not any softening, to please the serious, the pensive, or the disappointed; the child of affliction, or the victim of remorse; all those, ;—all in short, who have been taught by a habit or circumstances to cast a so"ber eye on man and the world,to chastise the gaiety and joyousness of life by a recollection of its many days of darkness, to visit the desert places of the earth, and muse amidst the ruins of human happiness. To bosoms so prepared, the "dark speech" of Pascal will ever find a comparatively ready access. But there are persons of a different cast, who might complain a little of this strong painting, and perhaps not wholly without reason. Notwithstanding the natural condition of man is lost, depraved, and in **a' serious view most unhappy, yet a merciful Providence has been pleased to surround him with many blessings, not immediately growing out of the practice of religion, although doubtless intended to excite him to it. We may truly say, that this desert soilma Wants not its hidden lustre→ ́our nature has the capacity of deriv*ing pleasure from many innoxious Sources from the interchange of labour and rest, from the pursuit of useful knowledge, from the culti vation of the arts, from the mode remember and to watch over a world by which he is insulted and forgotten. To omit, then, these bright spots in a picture of the present state of man, is surely a defect; and, to some minds, would seem one of no small magnitude. There are persons, of naturally amiable, or at least tranquil, dispositions; of decorous habits of no deep or large reflection, and who experience a tolerably uninterrupted course of those gentle, and (in themselves) innocent, enjoyments which we have mentioned. Such persons would be apt to shrink from descriptions which exhibit the earthly condition of mankind as one unmitigated expanse of restlessness, disappointment, and woe. They would declare that it was not so universally; and, for a proof of their assertion, would plausibly, and in some degree even justly, appeal to their own case. Perhaps our great author might have rendered his argument more level to characters of this class, if he had broken his general sketches of life a little more into detail, and, by specifying particular cases, gradually led his more narrow-minded readers to those comprehenive surveys of which he is so powerful a master; above all, if he had more particularly dwelt on the subject of death. This, indeed, is the best answer to every objection, and one that admits of no rejoinder. Grant to the worldling all that he can pretend of the hap- A perpetuity of bliss is bliss: And quite unparadise the realms of light. Thus it is, that for a confirmation of the scriptural account, we need not~ resort to the various shapes of suf fering by which our mortal condi tion is oppressed, to the portentous forms that preside (as the poet ex- 3 presses it), over the wounds and s wrecks of nature, to the awful monitions of ruined ambition or blasted pride, of pain and calamity, despair and death; but may consult the gentle virtues and blameless pleasures of private and domestic life, which will, with a more touching voice, repeat to us the same sad history. Besides the class of persons that has been mentioned as not likely to acquiesce in the gloomy descriptions of Pascal, there is another of a less respectable kind, who would, prowe allude to the thoughtless; the bably, be still more dissentient. dissipated; the men of pleasure; the votaries of fashion; the deliberate, calculating, epicurean profligates These, indeed, are bad subjects for the bliss the lectures and persuasions of the Of Paradise, which has surviv'd the fall. moralist, charm he never so wisely. For, surely, the various and multi- Scarcely would they be persuaded, plied capacity for those sober, and, though one rose from the dead. To in their own nature, innocent en- say the truth, their very insensi joyments, was a constituent part of bility (as Pascal observes of unbethe original perfection of man, as lievers in general) tends to establish the gratification of that capacity was the doctrines which they reject a part of his original felicity. The Their denial is itself an argument, remains, therefore, both of the fa- Did we not behold such melancholy culty, and of the means of exercis- instances of infatuation of heart, the ing it, may be considered as "shin- sensible proofs of human depravity. ing fragnients" of a better world; would appear less complete, as a as lingering beams of a glory that lazar-house would seem comparahas set. And, if we take these tively imperfect without a ward of blessings in connection with the maniacs. Yet, as Heaven extends imperfections and inquietudes by its offers of mercy to all men, even which they are attended; the these insensate lovers of pleasure abuses of which they are suscep- are not to be despaired of, nor tible; and the mortality to which abandoned to their folly. It is they are subject; they seem to tell highly desirable, therefore, that us, in some sense, not only the Pascal had addressed some part of truth, but the whole truth. They his reflections more peculiarly to intimate, though obscurely, the idea persons of this character; and, per both of our elevation and our fall, haps, had he survived to finish his Thus it is that the whole of our work, he would have left nothing, moral nature both what we suffer to be desired on the subject. His and what we enjoy-breathes a terrible eloquence was well-calcu consistent and harmonious languages lated to rouse these men, if any ง thing could, from their delusion. He would have painted with a dreadful fidelity, the fallacy of their joy, and the wretchedness which they gild over with smiles. He would have shewn them, that there is a perfect and a horrible consistency between such happiness as theirs, and the harshest pictures of worldly misery with which the moralist can charge his canvas. van Jud days by What sort of answer the characters in question might be disposed to make to the argument of our great author, (we mean, as that argument now stands), there is no occasion to conjecture. One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, and one certainly whom they would very gladly have chosen for their spokesman, has saved us the troubles The following is the note of Voltaire, on Pascal's assertion that all men, young and old, the great and the little, is complain of being unhappy. We omit only one clause, which the note ought never to have contained.orang beses on “Je sais qu'il est doux de se plaindre: que de tout temps on a vanté le passé pour inJurier le present; que chaque peuple a imaginé un âge d'or, d'innocence, de bonne santé, de repos et de plaisir, qui ne subsiste plus. Cependant j'arrive de ma province à Paris; on in'introduit dans u une très belle |