of St. Germain-des-Pres, whence at a later time it passed to the Bibliothèque du Roi. There it was examined and collated with the published text by M. Cousin, who in his Report expresses in a lively manner the feelings which took possession of him as he pursued his laborious task. "It was impossible," he says, "to look without painful emotion on the great folio book where the failing hand of Pascal had traced, during the agony of his last four years, the thoughts which rose in his mind, and which he deemed might be useful to him some day in conposing the great work that he meditated. He threw them in haste on the first scrap of paper that came to hand, in few words, and often even in half a word. Sometimes he dictated them to persons who happened to be present. Pascal's writing is full of abbreviations, ill-formed, almost undecipherable. It is these little papers without order or connect on which, collected and pasted on great sheets of paper, compose the manuscript of the “Thoughts." But M. Cousin had scarcely begun his labours when this first emotion was replaced by astonishment at the discovery which soon forced itself upon him. You would be frightened," he goes on to say, "at the enormous difference which the first glance at the original manuscript will show you, between the Thoughts' of Pascal, as they were written with his own hand, and all the editions, without excepting a single one, not even that of 1669, published by his family and his friends, nor that of 1779, which has become the model of all the editions that every year sees put forth." He then proceeds to give "samples of the alterations of all kinds" that he had detected; "alterations of words, alterations of turns, alterations of phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions, arbitrary and absurd piecings together, sometimes of a paragraph, sometimes of an entire chapter, by the help of phrases and paragraphs foreign to each other; and, what is worse, decompositions still more arbitrary and truly inconceivable of chapters, which in Pascal's manuscript are perfectly connected in all their parts, and profoundly wrought out." The original Port-Royal edition is stigmatised by him "as combining all the faults which ought to have been avoided. (1.) It omitted a great part of the Thoughts' contained in the autograph manscript, and it omitted precisely the most original, those which laid bare the soul of Pascal, his desolate scepticism, his restless and despairing faith. (2.) It changed sometimes in their substance, and awakened almost always in their form, the Thoughts' which it preserved. (3.) It gave a great number of Thoughts' which are not in the au tograph manuscript, and which yet bear the visible imprint of Pascal's hand without indicating the sources whence they are drawn.” "I defy analysis," he exclaims, on reviewing his discoveries, “to in vent any kind of alteration of the style of a great writer, which the style of Pascal has not suffered at the hands of Port-Royal !" The utter untrustworthiness of the received text, however, furnished only half the surprise. The world had imagined that in the celebrated Thoughts" it passed the outlines of a powerful defence of Christianity by a firm believer, in whom reason and faith went harmoniously hand in hand together. Great, therefore, was the astonishment when M. Cousin, having disinterred Pascal's authentic words, proclaimed aloud in the most confident tones that Pascal himself was a sceptic, a Pyrrhonist, whose reason plunged him into a bottomless abyss of doubt, out of which he could discover no escape except by a convulsive resolve to shut his eyes, and at all hazards believe. The very substance of Pascal's soul," says the Report, was a universal scepticism, against which he found no asylum but in a faith voluntarily blind; the difficulties which he encountered his reason did not surmount, but his will pushed aside, and his last, his true answer is that he will not have annihilation." "The ideas of Pascal,” it says in another place, "are not a play of his intellect; it is the painful travail of his soul: they penetrate it, they consume1t; it is the fiery dart fastened in his side, and he soothes his pain in expressing it." And again, “the man in Pascal does not resign himself to the scepticism of the philosopher; his reason cannot believe, but his heart needs to believe." To the heartrending scepticism which he thus discovers in the authentic " Thoughts" M. Cousin attributes the extraordinary mutilation which they underwent at the hands of his editors. There escape from Pascal, in the midst of the fits of his convulsive devotion, cries of misery and despair which neither Port-Royal, nor Desmolets, nor Bossut have dared to repeat." And taking this view, it was but natural or M. Cousi to point out how essentially Pascal's religion, such as he conceived it to have been, differed from the reasonable, wholesome faith of the Church. "His religion is not the Christianity of the Arnaulds and Malebranches, of the Fénélons and Bossuets, and solid and sweet fruit of reason and heart in a well-conditioned and wisely cultivated soul; it is a bitter fruit, ripened in the desolate region of doubt, under the arid breath of despair." Such was the tenor of this celebrated Report, and, proceeding from a philosopher and critic of the very eminent standing of M. Cousin, its effect could not fail to be immense. The Pascal literature was already considerable, and appeared to comprise almost everything that could be said on its ilustrious subjects, but under this fresh impulse it at once entered on an enormous extension; the withered stock blos. somed anew, and has ever since been yielding abundant fruit. The first result was the publication, in 1844, by M. Prosper Faugère, of an edition of the "Thoughts," reproducing with the severest accuracy every decipherable word and even half-word of the autograph manuscript, which, he says in his preface, we have read, or rather studied, page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, from the beginning to the end, and with the exception of a certain number of words, which we have taken care to mark as illegible, it has passed entire into our edition." It was a work which severely tasked both eye and brain, but he wrought at it, he says, not only with patience, but with " 'an indefatigable passion :" and it had its recompense, for, as Principal Tulloch remarks, "Nothing can deprive M. Faugère of the credit of being the first editor of a complete and authentic text of the Pensées'" In some respects, indeed, the work failed to satisfy the more fastidious of Pascal's admirers. The grouping of the fragments was after a scheme of M. Faugère's own, founded on indications which he imagined himself able to trace to Pascal's notes; and it was objected to as being fanciful, and even misleading, as well as novel. Besides, M. Faugère printed indiscriminately everything that was found in the medley of the autogragh scraps, however trivial or crude, or foreign to the projected work of which the "Pensées" were the rough outline. Other editors, accordingly, soon entered the field, claiming a liberty, not indeed to alter a single word, but to weed and rearrange the text; and the fruits of their labours are to be found in numerous subsequent editions which have continued to pour from the press, the chief of which, we believe, are those of Havet, 1852; Lahure, 1858; Louandre, 1866; and Victor Rochet, 1873. To the interest excited by M. Cousin's Report the students of Pascal owe more than a restoration of the authentic text of the "Thoughts." Both he and Faugére pushed their researches further, and were rewarded by discoveries that have brought out the figures of Pascal and his remarkable relatives with a clearness which they never possessed before, and have enabled us to recognise in them something more of our own flesh and blood. Of these discoveries we shall speak presently. What made the liveliest stir, however, and gave rise to the keenest discussion, was the charge of scepticism urged against Pascal, as we have already seen, by M. Cousin with “ a pen incisive," to use Sainte-Beuve's phrase, "as a sword of fire." All at once," adds the same writer in his vivacious way, "there arose a universal conflict; everyone rushed into print, or at least into speech, for or against Pascal." High as the authority of the accuser stood on such subjects, the accusation found not a few writers of the first rank to challenge its correctness. In France Faugère* and Sainte-Beuve + entered their protest, and were followed by the Abbé Flottes and the Abbé Maynard, § and later by Prévost-Paradol. From France the controversy quickly spread to other countries. In Germany Neander made a powerful defence of Pascal as a Christian philosopher, in two lectures delivered before the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin; ¶ and more recently Pascal's life and conflicts have been treated by Dr. Dreydorff with truly German industry and thoroughness. In Switzerland Pascal found a congenial exponent in the eloquent Vinet, the most eminent perhaps of the French Protestant divines of the present century, and the nearest to him in thought, of *"Pensées," Introd. +"Revue des deux Mondes," 1844. Etudes sur les Moralistes Français," whose collected papers and lectures on Pascal the third edition is now before us. Our own country, to which Pascal had long been dear, was, as it might have been expected, not slow to add her share to te debate, and in proportion to the favour which the "Thoughts" had long enjoyed with the religious portion of our community was the warmth shown in their defence. Mr. Henry Rogers led the way in his wellknown brilliant essay,* afterwards translated into French by M. Faugère, and was followed by Mr. (now Principal) Tulloch, † who, to use his own words, "ventured with the confidence of youth to draw from the 'Pensées' the outlines of a Christian philosophy." At the same time the authentic text of the "Thoughts" was introduced to English readers by Mr. Pearce's translation of Faugère's edition; and, in the excellent history of Port-Royal by Mr. Beard, which we have named at the head of this article, good use was made of the recent French authorities, and Pascal's philosophical and religious position was indicated with much discrimination. Lastly, not to extend this list of writers, we have Principal Tulloch's recent monograph on Pascal, the ripe fruit of his “ long and loving famil. iarity "with the subject, and written with the aim of "setting be fore the English reader perhaps a more full and connected account of the life and writings of Pascal than has yet appeared in our language." Of this little work we have formed a very favourable opinion, and it will probably be for some time to come the favourite popular biography in English of its illustrious subject. A marvel of neat and skilful compression, it only needs a revision of some of its renderings of Pascal's French to be almost perfect in its kind.§ Within its couple of hundred pages may be found everything of importance that is known of *"Edin. Review," January, 1847, on the "Genius and Writings of Pascal." +"British Quarterly Review," Aug., 1850. London, 1830. On § We feel bound to justify this exc ption by producing a few samples of inaccurate translation. In the "Amulet," p. 91, the soul's penitent self-accusation of having departed from God, "Je m'en suis séparé" (I have separated myself from Him), is twice rendered am separated from Him." On p. 169, Pascal's saying, "Ceux-là honorent bien la Nature, qui lui apprennent qu elle pent parler de tout, et même de théologie" (they honour Nature most who teach her that she can discourse of everything, even of theology), is turned into "they humour Nature most who learn from her that she can speak best on all subjects, even on theology." p. 174 the thought, "Incrédules les plus crédules. Ils croient les miracles de Vespasien, pour ne pas croire ceux de Moise" (the incredulous are the most credulous. They believe the miracles of Vespasian to escape believing the miracles of Moses), is given as "Unbelievers are very credulous: they believe the miracles of Vespasian, but not those of Moses ;" and "Les athées doivent dire des choses parfaitement claires" (Atheists are bound to say [only] things which are perfectly clear), is ambiguously represented by "Atheists must pronounce things perfectly clear)." Once more, on p. 171, we find a singular perversion of Pascal's meaning; he is suggesting a way of reminding ourselves of a duty which we dislike, and says. "Pour s'en souvenir il faut se proposer de faire quelque chose qu'on hait, et lors on s'excuse sur ce qu'on a autre chose à faire et on se souvient de son devoir par ce moyen (to remember it we should propose to do something we dislike, and then we excuse ourselves on the ground that we have something else to do, and we recollect our duty by this means); in Tulloch the last clause is unaccountably translated and so again forget our duty in this manner,' the author of the "Provincial Letters" and the "Pensées," whether as a man or a writer; and both his character and his remains are treated with an insight and a breadth, an affectionate sympathy and yet an enlightened discrimination, which leave little to be desired. Having sketched the story of the revived interest in Pascal, which has stimulated so many researches, and set so many pens at work in the present generation, we propose to use the materials, new as well as old, thus gradually accumulated, taking care to indicate their sources, for the purpose of setting before our readers as full an account as our space will permit of the character, writings, and place in literature, of that very remarkable man, of whom a recent writer in this Review has said that "his is the greatest name in the French Church-some may even think the greatest in French literature.”* The original and chief authentic source of our information respecting the incidents of Pascal's life is, of course, the simple and affectionate biography written shortly after his death by the elder of his two sisters, Gilberte, better known as Madame Périer, whose husband, who was also her cousin, came, like the Pascals, of a family connected with the French Parliaments, and was himself Counsellor of the Court of Aides, at Clermont, in Auvergne. She had her full share in the intellectual power, the beauty, and the capacity for deep religious impressions, which were characteristic of her father, Etienne Pascal, and her brother and sister, Blaise and Jacqueline. memoir which she has left us of her celebrated brother gives us, as Dr. Tulloch says, a The "lively, graphic, and yet dignified, portraiture of his youthful precocity, and again of the devotions and austerities of his later years. But it leaves many gaps unsupplied. Like other memoirs of the kind, it is written from a somewhat conventional point of view. No one, as M. Havet says, was nearer to him in all senses of the expression, or could have given a more true and complete account of all the incidents in his life; but she was not only his sister, but his enthusiastic friend and admirer, in whose eyes he was at once a genius and a saint-a man of God called to a great mission. It was from a consciousness of this mission, and from the full glory of his religious fame, that she looked back upon all his life; and the lines in which she draws it are coloured, in consequence, too gravely and monotonously. Certain particulars she drops out of sight altogether." How much is wanting in this biography may be conjectured from the single fact, that from the first page to the last Port-Royal is not so much as once named in it! The idea of Pascal without PortRoyal seems even stranger and more incomplete than would be that of Port-Royal without Pascal. This silence arose from motives of policy, for at the time when Madame Périer wrote, the truce known as the "Peace of Clement IX.," or the "Peace of the Church," existed between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, and it was deemed pru. dent to avoid everything that might have disturbed it, or been seized upon as a pretext for renewing the persecution under which the famous convent had already so severely suffered. Even when making #66 Quarterly Review," "The Church of France," July, 1878, |