"It is better to obey God than men."
I fear nothing; I hope for nothing. It is not so with the bishops.
Port-Royal fears, and it is bad policy to disperse them; for they will fear
no longer and will cause greater fear. I do not even fear your like
censures, if they are not founded on those of tradition. Do you censure all?
What! Even my respect? No. Say then what, or you will do nothing, if you do
not point out the evil, and why it is evil. And this is what they will have
great difficulty in doing.
Probability.--They have given a ridiculous explanation of certitude; for,
after having established that all their ways are sure, they have no longer
called that sure which leads to heaven without danger of not arriving there
by it, but that which leads there without danger of going out of that road.
921.... The saints indulge in subtleties in order to think themselves
criminals and impeach their better actions. And these indulge in subtleties
in order to excuse the most wicked.
The heathen sages erected a structure equally fine outside, but upon a bad
foundation; and the devil deceived men by this apparent resemblance based
upon the most different foundation.
Man never had so good a cause as I; and others have never furnished so good
a capture as you...
The more they point out weakness in my person, the more they authorise my
cause.
You say that I am a heretic. Is that lawful? And if you do not fear that men
do justice, do you not fear that God does justice?
You will feel the force of the truth, and you will yield to i
1031 Cor. 1:17. "Lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect."
104"Rend your heart."
105Ps. 9:14. "Have mercy."
106Is. 5:7. "He has looked for."
107Ezek. 20:25. Praecepta non bona. "Statutes that were not good."
[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 Euse