"Ah! This discourse transports me, charms me," etc.
If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is made by
a man who has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being,
infinite and without parts, before whom he lays all he has, for you also to
lay before Him all you have for your own good and for His glory, that so
strength may be given to lowliness.
234. If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on
religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an
uncertainty, sea voyages, battles! I say then we must do nothing at all, for
nothing is certain, and that there is more certainty in religion than there
is as to whether we may see to-morrow; for it is not certain that we may see
to-morrow, and it is certainly possible that we may not, see it. We cannot
say as much about religion. It is not certain that it is; but who will
venture to say that it is certainly possible that it is not? Now when we
work for to-morrow, and so on an uncertainty, we act reaso
She had many extraordinary discoveries of the glory of God and Christ;
sometimes, in some particular attributes, and sometimes in many. She
gave an account, that once, as those four words passed through her mind,
wisdom, justice, goodness, and truth, her soul was filled with a sense
of the glory of each of these divine attributes, but especially the
last. Truth, said she, sunk the deepest! And, therefore, as these words
passed, this was repeated, truth, truth! Her mind was so swallowed up
with a sense of the glory of God's truth and other perfection
[108]"I will establish my covenant between me and Thee for an everlasting
covenant, to be a God unto Thee."
109Gen. 17:9. "Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore."
[110]Gen. 49:18. "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord."
[111]Essays, 1. 22.
112Num. 11:29. Quis tribuat ut omnis populus prophetet. "Would God that all
the Lord's people were prophets."
[113]De cultu feminarum, i-3. "He could equally have renewed it, under the
Spirit's inspiration, after it had been destroyed by the violence of the
deluge, as, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian storming of
it, every document of the Jewish literature is generally agreed to have been
restored through Ezra."
[114]Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, V. viii. 14. "God was glorified, and
the Scriptures were recognized as truly divine, for they all rendered the
same things in the same words and the same names, from beginning to end, so
that even the heathen who were present knew that the Scriptures had been
translated by the inspiration of God. And it is no marvel that God did this,
for when the Scriptures had been destroyed in the captivity of the people in
the days of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Jews had gone back to their country
after seventy years, then in the times of Artaxerxes, the king of the
Persians, he inspired Ezra, the priest of the tribe of Levi, to restore all
the sayings of the prophets who had gone before, and to restore to the
people the law given by Moses." This is Pascal's rendering into Latin of the
passage from Eusebius of which the last lines are in Greek, above.
[115]"Each time that."
116Mark 2:10, 11. "But that ye may know that the son of man hath power on
earth to forgive sins