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After I had made up my mind to leave Naples, I had a visit from Don Pascal Latilla, who brought with him the Abbe Galiani, whom I had known at Paris. It may be remembered that I had known his brother at St. Agatha's, where I had stayed with him, and left him Donna Lucrezia Castelli. I told him that I had intended to visit him, and asked if Lucrezia were still with him.
"But about those ways of warring for the Cross!" inquired Afra. "I mean, and L'Ouverture, I think, means," said Pascal, "that nothing can immediately alter the nature of men; that the glorious Gospel itself is made to change the face of the world gradually; all the more surely, because slowly and naturally.
"You should ask Alice herself about that," said Canon Pascal quietly. A thrill of rapture ran through Felix, and he grasped the shoulder, on which his hand still rested, more firmly.
Pascal drew up his head with a deeply injured air, and remarked in the chilling tone of a person who is strongly tempted to retract his word, "Then there is nothing more to be said, M. le Marquis; and since you find the conditions onerous " "I did not say so," interrupted M. de Valorsay, quickly "I did not even think it!"
Certainly Browne has not, like Pascal, made the "great resolution," by the apprehension that it is just in the contrast of the moral world to the world with which science deals that religion finds its proper basis.
From a rational point of view the suffrage of numbers is to a certain extent justified if we think with Pascal. ``Plurality is the best way, because it is visible and has strength to make itself obeyed; it is, however, the advice of the less able. As universal suffrage cannot in our times be replaced by any other institution, we must accept it and try to adapt it.
M. Cousin fascinated us, but Pierre Leroux, with his tone of profound conviction and his thorough appreciation of the great problems awaiting solution, exercised a still more potent influence, and we did not see the shortcomings of his studies and the sophistry of his mind. My customary course of reading was Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Reid, and Dugald Stewart.
Any lighter vein that may have lingered in the Letters is abandoned from this point. Pascal ceases to address his friend in the country; the playful interchange that sprang from the idea of a third party, to whom Pascal was supposed to be merely reporting what he had heard, occurs no more.
Do not expect to find in this young geometrician, so soon consumed by disease and passion, the breadth, surface, and infinite variety of Bossuet, who, supported by vast and uninterrupted study, rose and rose until he gained the loftiest reaches of intellect and art, and commanded at pleasure every tone and every style. Pascal did not fulfil all his destiny.
Others should refrain from a fourth that is, from writing. Prefaces are another stumbling-block. "The 'I," said Pascal, "is hateful." Speak as little of yourself as possible; for you must know that the reader's self-esteem is as great as yours. He will never forgive you for wanting to condemn him to have a good opinion of you.
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