So, considering how much appearance there is that something exists other than what I see I have sought whether this God of Whom every one talks may not have left some marks of Himself.  I search everywhere, and see only obscurity everywhere.  Nature offers me nothing but matter of possible doubt and disquiet.  If I saw there nothing to mark a divinity, I should make up my mind to believe nothing of it.  If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I should rest in peace in faith.  But seeing too much to deny, and too little to affirm, I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hundred times wishes that, if a God supports nature, she would show it without equivocation; and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive, she would suppress them wholly; that she say all of nothing, that I may see my path.

This is the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but precision; it has but one real home—­the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor.  The mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic suicide; it must absorb itself in God; and in the bankruptcy of twelfth-century science the Western Christian seemed actually on the point of attainment; he, like Pascal, touched God behind the veil of scepticism.

The schools had already proved one or two points which need never have been discussed again.  In essence, religion was love; in no case was it logic.  Reason can reach nothing except through the senses; God, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if He is to be known at all, He must be known by contact of spirit with spirit, essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by absorption of our existence in His; by substitution of his spirit for ours.  The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in order to hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal.  Saint Francis of Assisi had affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint Bernard had been less powerful than it was.  The Virgin had asserted it in tones more gentle, but any one may still see how convincing, who stops a moment to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful Chartres spire up to God.

The Virgin, indeed, made all easy, for it was little enough she cared for reason or logic.  She cared for her baby, a simple matter, which any woman could do and understand.  That, and the grace of God, had made her Queen of Heaven.  The Trinity had its source in her,—­ totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium,—­and she was maternity.  She was also poetry and art.  In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was real.