But what are we to think of the Christian system of faith that forms itself upon the idea of only one world?  Alas! what is this to the mighty ocean of space and the almighty power of the Creator?  From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come to die in our world, because they say one man and one woman had eaten an apple?

It has been by rejecting the evidence that the word or works of God in the creation affords to our senses, and the action of our reason upon that evidence, that so many wild and whimsical systems of faith, and of religion, have been fabricated and set up.  There may be many systems of religion that so far from being morally bad are in many respects morally good; but there can be but one that is true, and that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things consistent with the ever-existing word of God that we behold in His works.

I shall close by giving a summary of the deistic belief: 

First, that the creation we behold is the real word of God, in which we cannot be deceived.  It proclaims His power, it demonstrates His wisdom, it manifests His goodness and beneficence.

Secondly, that the moral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all His creatures.  That seeing, as we daily do, the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practise the same towards each other, and consequently that everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty.

It is certain that, in one point, all nations of the earth and all religions agree.  All believe in a God.  The things in which they disagree are the redundancies annexed to that belief; and, therefore, if ever an universal religion should prevail, it will not be in believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies, and believing as man believed at first.  But in the meantime let every man follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and the worship he prefers.

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BLAISE PASCAL

LETTERS TO A PROVINCIAL

Blaise Pascal, mathematician, theologian, and one of the greatest writers of French prose, was born on June 19, 1623, at Clermont-Ferrand, and died on August 19, 1662.  His mother died in his fourth year, and the father, an eminent lawyer, took the boy with his two sisters to Paris.  Pascal showed the most astonishing mathematical genius; he produced at the age of seventeen a profound work on conic sections, and devoted the following years to physical researches and to investigations in the higher mathematics.  In 1654, Pascal, having experienced a remarkable vision, which he recorded