never loses sight; he is a preacher and his art is a means, not an end. This was to be in the very spirit of Port Royal. Therefore he cannot love poetry, which he would banish from the Christian republic as Plato sent it away with compliments out of his Utopia.

That practical aim which inspired the 'Provinciales' runs through Pascal's Pensées' and determines his method. He detested abstractions; he could not look at 'things in themselves'; he is always subjective and of necessity controversial. In the 'Letters' he had before him one of the greatest themes ever broached by Christianity; for we may term it dialectics, or how the law of love is to be applied to life. Casuistry was, in idea, nothing else than this, a resolution of general principles into conduct in the light of an ideal. But the criticism we gain from so mordant a satire is negative, and the danger lurks in it of a Voltairian persiflage, or of Gibbon's 'solemn sneer,' when controversy is pointed upon another object, not against the follies of lax theologians, but against religion itself. There was too much of the Fronde in Pascal's method; he is a partisan at all times; and his defence of the Gospel, when he attacked the Libertines, as in the 'Provinciales' he had attacked the Jesuits, would have been a pamphlet no less than an apology, had he lived to complete it.

In our day the 'Letters' are more praised than studied. The 'Pensées,' though a heap of fragments-Sibylline leaves which no ingenuity can reduce to order-have acquired new significance. In point of style they exhibit a perfection which stamps them as absolute in form and equal in depth to the mind that gave them birth, as transparent, unaffected, characteristic of their author, while expressing a mood of Christian evidences which now appeals to many who cannot find a solution of their doubts in the common view. It is an argument derived from the experience of conversion, as Pascal underwent it in the 'night of power,' whose record he always bore about him, and thus it resumes the purpose of his whole life; an argument faithful to the principles he had gone upon during his investigations in science, and thus it contains by implication his theory of knowledge. The problem of Pascal, if to be solved at all, must find its answer in these scattered leaves as they fell from his dying hands. Vol. 213.-No. 425. 2 H

Pascal had become a changed man in response to a sudden supernatural experience, as by a vision of fire, on lines which, a century afterwards, staid ecclesiastics denounced as enthusiasm and Methodism. His Thoughts' are an apology for this ecstatic way of finding salvation; they yield us the Puritan philosophy, disengaged from Calvin's terms, and set out in a language not technical but intensely human. It is their very simplicity which has made his reasonings difficult to follow on the part of learned Christians and men of the world. For he takes no account of learning, while he supposes in the disciple he would win a religious instinct which the worldling, as such, cannot comprehend. It is true that he begins by clearing the ground, or by a destructive criticism of the apologetics in fashion. And he borrows his weapons, ready made, from Montaigne, whose extreme repugnance to the Gospel was cloaked under an affectation of respect, and who severed it from reason that he might allow it to perish on the rocks of fanaticism. Pascal went along with him one mile, but turned off at the second. In plain words, the sceptic and the Puritan both agree that human nature, left to itself, has neither knowledge nor love of divine things. But whereas the sceptic rests in this as his final conclusion, to the Puritan it is a mere preliminary; he is not dismayed when told that the natural man is blind and deaf, nay, dead to religion. He never dreamt it was otherwise. Accordingly, Pascal makes a clean sweep of rational theology, and with it of the apologetics taught in the schools. Nor does he spare Descartes. All must go, the argument from design, the geometrical method, the appeal to unbiassed reason. His apology is not a chapter in abstract or impersonal science; it is a call to everlasting life.

To establish religion in its own power, on an experience and principles peculiar to itself, was, he would contend, the only means of setting it free from dogmatists who ground it into notions, and of protecting it against sceptics by telling them frankly that, except through a miraculous change, they never could know it. In so doing, Pascal gave up the pretension of treating Christianity as something universal, as a matter of cool evidence and unprejudiced reflection. It was meant for the elect, not for all mankind. Natural religion did not

exist; and its arguments, for instance in Raymond de Sébonde, were not real proofs but meditations of a soul converted by grace which saw all things in God. From this coign of vantage, using our modern idiom, it would be true to maintain that an agnostic is nearer the Gospel than a rationalist. Like Jansen, this prophetic seer beheld the eighteenth century coming on with its Deism, its exaltation of man's original qualities, and its rosetinted prospects of the future. By anticipation he was refuting Voltaire, Rousseau, and Paley. To the age of reason he opposed the age of faith. He could therefore depict humanity in the darkest colours of Lucretius and show forth nature as its cruel stepmother.

In this process we observe one, who by intellect was distinctly Greek, eliminating from religion all but the Hebrew elements to which it is indebted for its quality of revelation-the quality which distinguishes it from systems that are the offspring of man's own thought. When Pascal said, 'The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand,' he was echoing the language of the Old Testament; but he was also laying claim to a deeper logic than is taught in books. That other, larger apprehension, personal, though often repeated, was not mere feeling nor an 'idol of the cave.' For it took hold of experience; it was equal to the greatness and littleness of man; it brought joy out of sorrow and truth out of scepticism. Ideas were not its term, but real and eternal objects of which ideas could but faintly trace the outlines. In and through the 'mystery of Jesus' it solved all other mysteries, and the voice of religion thus made certain proclaimed the harmony of the world.

It would be tempting now to follow the fortunes of this Hebrew apologetic, opposed alike to speculation and unbelief, along its remarkable course. We should trace it in the ruin of natural theology which Kant undertook by his Critique of Pure Reason,' and in the appeal to experience of life and the moral law which governs his constructive efforts, though he sinks down to an almost impersonal idea of duty without God. We should see Pascal beginning the journey towards agnosticism which has brought later French generations to the threshold of Auguste Comte, who finds the only oracle of truth in the Church of Humanity, discarding the supernatural because

reason is unable to discover it. Paley, in the schools of Oxford, renews Minucius Felix and Descartes. But he is opposed by Newman, who reiterates the arguments of Pascal against a scheme of evidences from which grace is absent; who defends the logic of the heart as larger and deeper than the formal syllogism; who hears the voice of God in his own conscience; who cannot away with the 'usurpations of reason'; and who requires in a convert to Christianity not the mere gift of concluding well from premisses laid down in books, but an ethical temper and the will to believe.' We might even ask whether the so-called 'pragmatism' of a more recent philosophy has not in Pascal its author and instance.

On these high matters it is expedient to keep silence rather than to speak inadequately. The simple mention of them, however, will suggest that in the 'Pensées' great questions are opened, not to be laid to rest until a system transcending scholastic geometry has been found, in which the arguments, abstract and concrete alike, that commend religion to the head as well as the heart, shall combine in a Christian apology. Such a scheme, to quote words which describe it admirably, would be at once mystical and rational'; it would enlist in its service the best forces of both worlds-the world of reason and morals, and the world of sympathy and emotion.' Because Pascal held too lightly by reason, his demonstration of Christianity has the air of an assault upon intellect itself; as the whole of his casuistry ended in detachment from common duties, it appeared to sin against civilisation; and the tragedy of his life is, perhaps, at last, that in defending the truth of revelation he sacrificed the truth of humanity.

This may be called the mystical fallacy; and Pascal died of it. Because the Infinite claims us, therefore finite things are to have no value. Hence those latter days, made poignant to all who read of them by strange unlovely traits, that perverse refusal of amenities which protect us against the lower life. Religion cannot dispense with morality; Pascal has proved this on the body of Escobar. But neither can it abjure manners and reason, unless we would justify Voltaire in denouncing it as a deadly superstition.

WILLIAM BARRY.

Art. 7.-THE PROMISE OF LATIN AMERICA.

1. The South American Series. Edited by Martin Hume. London: Fisher Unwin. Chile, by G. F. Scott Elliott, 1907. Peru, by C. R. Enock, 1908. Mexico, by C. R. Enock, 1909. Argentina, by W. A. Hirst, 1910.

2. A History of South America. By C. E. Akers. London: Murray, 1904.

3. Through Five Republics. By P. F. Martin. London: Heinemann, 1905.

4. Mexico of the Twentieth Century. By P. F. Martin. Two vols. London: Arnold, 1907.

5. The Republic of Colombia. London: Stanford, 1906.

By F. Loraine Petre.

6. Argentina, Past and Present. By W. H. Koebel. New and enlarged edition. London : Kegan Paul, 1910. 7. The Rise and Progress of the South American Republics. By G. R. Crichfield. Two vols. London: Unwin, 1909. 8. The Great States of South America. By Domville Fife. London: Unwin, 1910.

And other works.

THE large number of works published during the past five or six years upon the republics of Latin America furnishes a conclusive proof of the interest felt in the subject of which they treat. The list given above is representative of those that have recently appeared, but is far from exhaustive. There are several reasons for such a display of interest at the present time. In the first place the great advance in prosperity of the four leading Latin American States, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, and the proof that has been afforded of the latent resources and bright prospects of these countries under stable government, has attracted universal attention to them as fields for investment, trade and settlement. In the second place, there is at the present time no portion of the earth's surface less known than large areas of the vast and imperfectly explored interior of the South American continent, and none with more remarkable and grandiose physical features. The giant Cordilleras of the Andes, running without a break parallel to the Pacific coast for 3500 miles and at no great distance from it, teem with mineral wealth and form the watershed of