and who ought to be its defenders, wavering and falling.  I declare to you that I was so overcome with grief that I was unable to support it, and could not help breaking down.’” Blaise Pascal was the worthy brother of Jacqueline; in the former, as well as the latter, the soul was too ardent and too strong for its covering of body.  Nearly all his relatives died young.  “I alone am left,” wrote Mdlle.  Perier, when she had become, exceptionally, very aged.  “I might say, like Simon Maccabeus, the last of all his brethren, All my relatives and all my brethren are dead in the service of God and in the love of truth.  I alone am left; please God I may never have a thought of backsliding!”

Pascal was unable to finish his work.  “God, who had inspired my brother with this design and with all his thoughts,” writes his sister, “did not permit him to bring it to its completion, for reasons to us unknown.”  The last years of Pascal’s life, invalid as he had been from the age of eighteen, were one long and continual torture, accepted and supported with an austere disdain of suffering.  Incapable of any application, he gave his attention solely to his salvation and the care of the poor.  “I have taken it into my head,” says he, “to have in the house a sick pauper, to whom the same service shall be rendered as to myself; particular attention to be paid to him, and, in fact, no difference to be made between him and me, in order that I may have the consolation of knowing that there is one pauper as well treated as myself, in the perplexity I suffer from finding myself in the great affluence of every sort in which I do find myself.”  The spirit of M. de St. Cyran is there, and also the spirit of the gospel, which caused Pascal, when he was dying, to say, “I love poverty, because Jesus Christ loved it.  I love wealth, because it gives the means of assisting the needy.”  A genius unique in the extent and variety of his faculties, which were applied with the same splendid results to mathematics and physics, to philosophy and polemics, disdaining all preconceived ideas, going unerringly and straightforwardly to the bottom of things with admirable force and profundity, independent and free even in his voluntary submission to the Christian faith, which he accepts with his eyes open, after having weighed it, measured it, and sounded it to its uttermost depths, too steadfast and too simple not to bow his head before mysteries, all the while acknowledging his ignorance.  “If there were no darkness,” says he, “man would not feel his corruption; if there were no light, man would have no hope of remedy.  Thus it is not only quite right, but useful, for us that God should be concealed in part, and revealed in part, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own misery, and to know his own misery without knowing God.”  The lights of this great intellect had led him to acquiesce in his own fogs.  “One can be quite sure that there is a God, without knowing what He is,” says he.