warn, but neither the church nor the confessor can abrogate the great fact of personal accountability for transgression. In this way the Provinciales foretold the Pensées. Their leading principle is the same, applied in the former to a specific case, extended and made general in the latter. If divine grace alone can heal, then God is essential to man. If the great concern of humanity is its eternal welfare, then without God man is of all creatures most miserable. With Him we have full happiness and joy. Here is the fundamental thought of the Pensées. God being necessary to man's happiness, all man's energies should be bent towards seeking God. Neither scepticism nor intellectual vain-glory should hinder so urgent a quest. With Montaigne and Descartes ever before him indeed, the occasion of the Pensées may be found in the attraction exerted on their author by the Essais (see the "Entretien avec M. de Saci" on Epictetus and Montaigne) — Pascal is forced into a warfare against both religious indifference and a God revealed by reason. He could not base his faith on such uncertainties. They did not satisfy the needs of his soul. Nature does not know that God is. The mind does not see His existence. The soul alone, which feels its wretchedness in sin, is sure that there is a Redeemer, for it is only under the conditions of wants thus felt that the Redeemer reveals Himself. There is, therefore, an inherent antagonism between the Essais and Discours on the one hand and the Pensées on the other. Pascal by no means rejects reason: "Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée " (Art. I, pensée 61, page 83, line 17; see, also, Art. I. pensées 2 and 11). A religion which is not reasonable would be absurd. Yet he denies to pure thought the power of attaining the goal of humanity. It is the heart, rather: "Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point" (Art. XXIV, pensée 5, page 110), and God is perceived by the feelings, not by the judgment. These truths are vital, and Pascal's mode of expressing them was commensurate with their importance. If classical French prose did not begin with the Lettres provinciales, as is often said, it cannot be questioned that they are the first prose work in French which maintains a uniform standard of literary excellence. Controversial literature does not know their like for keenness, vigor, and variety of argument. Their vocabulary is abundant and ready, their periods clear, strong and concise. These are qualities which characterize the Pensées also, despite the absence of the last touch of the master's hand, while the later work adds to them the attractions of eloquence and imagination. III. It is quite another study of man which Pascal's noble contemporary, La Rochefoucauld,' offers us. Concern for the soul's salvation is among the least of his cares. Born to one of the highest stations in France, mingling always with the life of courts, La Rochefoucauld's objective point was the rewards of this world. His failure to attain them made him an author. Literature became a means with him of enjoining the lessons of frustrated ambition. His Maximes, therefore, are rather individual than general. They are the fruits of the career of one man, and present observations which were made on but one class of society. So far as the traits of character they delineate are common to mankind, so far their epigrams are true and lasting. Otherwise they tell but a part of the story, and possess that interest only which attaches to the satire of the past. La Rochefoucauld's philosophy of man is quite like Pascal's, notwithstanding his different purpose in formulating it. The 1 François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, born at Paris, September 15, 1613. Married in 1628, soldier 1629, begins court life in 1630. Many love affairs. Joined the Fronde because his duchess was refused a stool at court, and the right to enter the gate of the Louvre in her carriage. From 1656, in broken health, frequents the salons of Paris. Attaches himself to Mme de Sablé and Mme de La Fayette. Died March 16, 1680.- Published the Maximes (from 1665 on.) Wrote Mémoires of the Regency of Anne of Austria. Maximes teach us that the soul is corrupt by nature, given over to evil. Even "nos vertus ne sont le plus souvent que des vices déguisés" (heading to the Maximes, page 114). But while they continually insist on this view of man's degradation, and constantly repeat that humanity obeys the promptings of selfishness and self-seeking, they rarely show that desire for moral regeneration which actuated Pascal, or consider anything beyond the limits of earthly gratification. "Amour-propre the fulcrum of La Rochefoucauld's world. is יי It is not the thought, then, of the Maximes which has assured them a lasting place in literature. The explanation of their survival is to be found in their form. Their casting is epigrammatic, attaining its final shape only after repeated handlings, in which some of the highest minds of France shared with their avowed author. For conciseness, directness and polish the Maximes may safely be called models of expression. Subsequent writers for many generations are under obligations to them in these particulars, and none perhaps more so than Voltaire, who thus indirectly acknowledges his debt to the collection: "Il accoutume à penser et à renfermer ses pensées dans un tour vif, précis et délicat" (Siècle de Louis XIV, c. 32). IV. Posterity has long admired in Bossuet the orator and the historian, and has begun to do justice to the merit of his polemical writings also. With his contemporaries he was undoubtedly one of the great powers of the time, though his plebeian 1 Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, born at Dijon, September 27, 1627. Jesuit school at Dijon; College of Navarre at Paris, 1642. In 1643 extemporized a sermon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Bachelor's thesis defended, 1648, in presence of Condé, governor of his province. Priest and doctor of Sorbonne, 1652. Canon at Metz, 1649 to 1659; preached at Dijon (1656) and Paris (1657). Stationed at Paris from 1659. Bishop of Condom 1669. Preceptor to the Dauphin, 1670. Bishop of Meaux, 1681. Died April 12, 1704. Many sermons, funeral orations, polemics against heretics, free-thinkers, and the like, religious treatises, and Discours sur l'Histoire universelle (1681). birth closed to him the doors of the highest ecclesiastical distinctions. But it could not injure his leadership. He had fixed on his vocation early in life. His studies had given the appropriate historical support to his faith and the equipment necessary to a theologian. From his very ordination he was in demand as a preacher. Few churchmen have ever received the applause he did, or been rewarded with so much worldly success. Yet, in spite of this publicity and intercourse with the ruling element of the nation, Bossuet remained as true to the principles of the Gospel as Pascal had done in his retirement. Nor did any personal friendship prevent him from applying them. His zeal was pure, his faith was simple. The discourses in which he found himself face to face with the grandees of the land, his sermons and funeral orations, repeat without ceasing the truth which was also the great burden of the Pensées : Without divine grace man is vanity. Bossuet was always an evangelist, laboring for the salvation of souls with unfaltering fervor. He was also an expounder of historical Christianity. We read in his Discours sur l'Histoire universelle how the progress of the world, from the earliest ages, had been conditioned by the evolution of the Jewish and Christian religion. The proclamation of the Gospel had been prepared by God's dealings with the Hebrews and preluded by all the events which had taken place even among the heathen. The real reason for the creation of man was to be found in his redemption through Christ. The rise and fall of empires are but illustrations of this great fact. It is God's providence, therefore, and not the working out of blind forces, which leads humanity along its earthly way, and this same providence sanctifies all individual trials and triumphs to the common end of universal salvation. The historian with Bossuet went hand in hand with the polemist. The great custodian of historical Christianity, he argued, is the Church, which has grown with the growth of the faith, and developed with its development. Creeds and de crees are the visible records of this growth. They are formulated from time to time as the spirit of religion demands expression. To object, then, to the established usages of the Church, or to refuse obedience to its regulations, is tantamount to attacking Christianity itself. Occupying this point of view, we are not surprised to find that many of Bossuet's religious controversies were with earnest believers who doubted the authority of the Councils, or who claimed to follow a purer faith than the one generally accepted. Towards the Protestants on the one hand and the Quietists on the other he was exceptionally severe, though he always supported the claims of the Gallican church among the Catholics. In the dispute between Port-Royal and the Jesuits, on the subject of ethics, his sympathies for the moral teachings of the former led him to take an active part in the condemnation of the casuists, which Pascal's Provinciales eventually brought about. The Jansenist doctrine of grace, however, did not meet. with his approval. He also had the intellectual keenness to perceive the mischief Cartesianism might do religion, and in his apologetics he answered in advance much of the reasoning which the sceptics of the eighteenth century were to borrow from that philosophical system. Bos The funeral orations of Bossuet are the works by which he is most widely known, and which, perhaps, best constitute his claim to fame. For he made them literature. Funeral orations, before his day, were eulogies, panegyrics for the most part, in which there was but little substance or regard for style. suet's idea of his priestly mission did not allow him to be satisfied with such productions. In taking up the funeral oration, he remodelled it, gave it the general outline and plan of a sermon, made it part of the church service, not only praised the dead, but drew lessons from their departed greatness for the admonition of the living, and vitalized it with his own earnest spirit. His aggressive temperament was well suited to the display of oratory. It supplied the chief characteristics of his style, such as force, directness, flow, eloquence, sublimity even. The re |