clining country. With the flight of his spirit fled that of his country also; and Rome, having shot her last ray of glory, henceforth sunk rapidly in the darkness of midnight.

The character of Julian well deserves the deep study of all. He seemed peculiarly adapted for the age in which he lived; and if any arm could have saved Rome, it was his. But the day of her death had come, and like Assyria, Persia, and Greece, it was too her fate to sink into decay and oblivion. He undoubtedly prolonged her expiring struggle, but could not avert the fate which awaited her.

By the writers of his age, the character of Julian has been most unjustly defamed. He is branded with the base epithet of " Apostate,” and this, too, by a set of nominally theological Fathers of his age, to whom the epithet would far more fitly apply. It seems very doubtful whether at any period of his life, after his boyhood, he had been a Christian in heart. As to his being so powerful an advocate of the religion of his fathers-as for his inveterate hatred of Christianity, and his doing all in his power to extirpate it-for this, who can blame him? In his time, how did Christianity appear? She had debased herself in the extreme; she had defiled her garments of purity, by the sordid contamination of the world; and now she stalked abroad, clothed in the garb of hypocrisy and base sensuality. The man of sin, the mystery of Babylon had already commenced its work; and the religion of Jesus Christ, pure and uncorrupted in its divine source, had become dreadfully vitiated and perverted by sinful man. The shepherds of the flock had forgotten their sacred charge; and the links of the spiritual chain of the Succession were sadly rusted and broken; bishop and archbishop, wrapped in the rich folds of their silken robes, reveled amid the affluence of their episcopal dignity; the pretended messengers of peace, with each other or the civil dignitaries they were continually at war; the heralds of the glad tidings of salvation, terror accompanied their footsteps, while they threatened the horrors of purgatory to all who would not comply with their harsh and covetous demands; the laity, the poor affrighted laity, bent under their Scourge, and in vain sought to purge their spiritual at the expense of their corporeal nature.

Julian perceived the evils which Christianity seemed to produce; he saw the empire torn by intestine religious warfare; he saw the professed ministers of the Church of God polluting themselves with every sordid lust; and sickening at the sight, he turned away in disgust. He thought of the religion of his fathers, that religion under the auspices of which Rome had risen to the supremacy of the whole earth. He remembered Athens, so endeared by every youthful association; and his classic soul took fire as he thought of those gods and that religion under the influence of which Orpheus tuned his lyre, Homer sang, Demosthenes spake, and Plato reasoned. Of that religion he desired to be the reviver. For its restoration he disputed with the ablest theologians of his time; and the works of Julian, for purity and eloquence of style, will ever deserve the highest praise of the historian and philosopher. The edict of universal toleration, which

he issued in the beginning of his reign, speaks the charitableness of his spirit. And if afterwards he was tempted to employ, in a measure, the sword of persecution, it was through the too excessive zeal of his soul, to reestablish a religion, which, though he was a despiser of its vulgar mythological fables, nevertheless he inwardly adored as the time-honored religion of his country and his fathers.

T. R. G. P.

THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS.

THE name of Blaise Pascal is less celebrated in this country than his splendid genius might lead us to anticipate. Though ranking with Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Edwards, in the power and comprehension of his intellect, he is less familiarly known to most of our countrymen than Fenelon or La Fontaine. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, his name has become almost a synonime with genius. Locke styled him "that prodigy of parts;" Bayle ascribed to him one of the loftiest intellects ever known among men. Voltaire regarded him as "ce fameux ecrivain, misanthrope sublime." D'Alembert, Condorcet, Bossuet, Boileau, and scores of others, united in admiring his writings.

Their praises are not extravagant. The man who, at an age below that at which the great Newton left the University, was astonishing all Europe by the splendor of his mathematical talents; who, in a single series of letters, combining the withering irony of Junius with the sublime and holy eloquence of Bossuet, at once transformed a rough, half-barbarous dialect into one of the most polished languages in Europe, and gave the most formidable ecclesiastical institution in Christendom a blow from which it never recovered; who, in a brief career of thirty-nine years, established a brilliant triple reputation, as a natural philosopher, a theologian, and a man of letters; could hardly be extravagantly praised. But the career of Pascal appears incredible when we consider that, for a great part of his life, he was continually harassed, and sometimes almost driven to madness, by a disease which finally brought him to his grave. The works which have rendered him immortal, and to accomplish any one of which, most men might gladly devote their three-score years and ten, were the productions of a few lucid intervals, when that noble intellect was allowed to come forth from the gloom which so generally obscured it.

It were a vain attempt to discuss here the various labors of Pascal. His versatile genius, passing from experiments upon atmospheric pressure; to show up the Jesuits to the derision of Europe; investigating the properties of the cycloids; and again committing to stray scraps of paper conceptions as profound and sublime as were ever vouchsafed to an uninspired mortal; would weary the adventurous pursuer till he should gasp for breath and abandon the chase.

Did time and space permit, we would gladly remark at some length

upon the "Pensees." Those invaluable fragments were intended by their author to serve as materials for a great work in defense of the Christian religion. Originally committed, without a semblance of arrangement, to the first slips of paper which chanced to be within reach, they have suffered grievously from the officious kindness of friends and editors endeavoring to revise and restore them. M. Faugère has, however, by a diligent collation of manuscripts, restored them, as he believes, to their original form. These Reflections, sublime and imposing even in their fragments, might, but for the summons which called the Thinker from his toil to serve his Master in a higher sphere, have formed part of a most elaborate and powerful vindication of Christianity. They are the capitals and the friezes, half-hewn, for a magnificent temple, from which the immortal artist was called away before his work had arisen from its foundations. M. Faugère has freed the fragments from the rubbish which had accumulated upon them; and from their surpassing beauty we may almost imagine a faint cutline of the structure which they were intended to adorn.

But we hasten to that matchless series of essays, with the fame of which all Europe has resounded, and in which we have one of the noblest monuments which are left us of the genius of their author.

The order of Jesuits obtained a more extensive and powerful influence, perhaps, in France, than in any other state of Christendom. By arts peculiarly their own, they subjected and controlled the fickle disposition of that singular nation. Constant to nothing else in the heavens above or the earth beneath, the French readily abandoned themselves to be duped by the Jesuits. In the political world, revolution was the order of the day. Alternate factions rose and fell, like the scales of a balance. The throne had not been exempt from the general instability. Henry the Fourth had been the leader of the Huguenots; he died a Papist. The terrible night of the 23d of August, when, in the impious language of the king's medals, "Piety put the sword into the hands of Justice," had passed, and revealed to the world the barbarous spirit of Romanism. Rochelle had fallen, and left upon all Protestant Europe the burning shame of having abandoned to its fate that last great bulwark of religious liberty in France. Political revolutions, however, had little influence upon the steadily increasing interests of the Jesuits.

But they were destined to meet with a signal and humiliating check. Their shameless perversion of religion and morality awakened the indignation of Pascal, and when he concentrated upon them the burning rays of his irony, they shrank abashed, like the arch-fiend when touched by the spear of Ithuriel,—

"And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

Virtue in her shape how lovely."

In a secluded valley, not many miles from Versailles, stands a single Gothic arch, all that now remains of the once famous monastery of Port Royal. Long the asylum of science and religion in their purest forms, that sequestered retreat contained some of the purest

souls and the most exalted intellects which France could boast during the renowned era of "Louis le Grand." But the harmless and lovely character of its inmates did not preserve them from collision with the Jesuits. Antoine Arnaud, a bosom friend of Pascal, boldly animadverted upon the scandalous sophisms of the Order, subversive alike of piety and morality. The Jesuits replied, employing the standing argument of those worthy fathers, by accusing him of heresy. Arnaud was a member of the Sorbonne, or Theological Department of the University of Paris. By introducing the votes of a motley throng of begging friars, they procured his expulsion. The Jesuits were, to all appearance, completely triumphant. Arnaud had written a defense of his own position, which, though unanswerable in its argumentation, was so heavy and monotonous in its style, that it gained many admirers but few readers. The people at large heard of his expulsion from the Sorbonne. They were less generally informed of the miserable trickery which had expelled him.

A new champion now entered the field. Arnaud was expelled from the Sorbonne, Jan. 31st, 1656. On the 23d of the same month had

appeared the first of the Provincial Letters; by which the Jesuits were immediately pilloried for a laughing-stock to all Europe. Arnaud had wisely passed over his case to the hands of Pascal. Never was a cause committed to a more efficient advocate. Never was a more terrible chastisement administered to any association of men. The first letter could not save Arnaud's seat in the Sorbonne. But it forced the Jesuits to rue the day on which they came into collision with Port Royal. The succeeding Provinciales appearing at short intervals, fell, like the blows of old Entellus, with a crushing weight upon the doomed Fraternity. No chicanery could withstand their keen and cutting irony. The Jesuits raged and stormed in a most ludicrous outburst of indignation. They stigmatized the Letters as a tissue of falsehood. But their unknown tormentor quoted their own writers, giving his references with the most scrupulous accuracy. They endeavored to raise an alarm against him as a heretic. But his readers wished better evidence than a hue and cry; and they would have continued to read and admire such exquisite writing as abounded in the Letters, if they had known it to proceed from the Arch Enemy himself.

The Jesuits never recovered from the chastisement to which the Great Satirist had subjected them. The conclusion of the whole affair is thus described by M. Geruzez: "The wound was inflicted; the Society of Jesuits survived long enough to close the schools of Port Royal, to scatter its illustrious recluses, to reduce their lives to a continuous conflict, to employ the dragoons against those pious Sisters who asked but the privilege of praying to Heaven in retirement; in fine, to overturn their Asylum from its foundations and cast its fragments to the winds; but the deadly shaft had struck the vitals of their Order, haeret lateri lethalis ærundo; and that shaft is the Provincial Letters."

These Letters are not remarkable for their irony alone. Pascal

never took up his pen, like Junius, to gratify his personal animosities, nor to signalize the weight of his blows by the terrible effect with which they should fall upon his victim. We believe that he entered upon his contest with the Jesuits, animated by the same lofty conscientiousness which checked his brilliant career in philosophy, and led him, even in early life, to commune with the holy recluses of Port Royal. While riding on a bridge, near Neuilly, he had met with an accident, from which he barely escaped with his life. From that hour, like Luther after his escape from the thunder-bolt which struck down his friend, Pascal believed himself divinely warned to renounce the world and its pleasures. He had not passed through the terrible discipline to which it pleased Heaven to subject him, to no purpose. Thenceforward his motives were as high and holy as the eternal interests to which he had devoted his life.

Hence there is an air of seriousness about even the keenest sallies of wit in the Provinciales; and hence, especially, he soon abandons the ironical style of the early Letters, and breaks forth in a denunciation of the Jesuits as majestic as it is indignant. "The precursor of Moliere," says the critic whom we have before quoted, "becomes the rival of Demosthenes and of Bossuet."

M. Geruzez has, accordingly, justly observed that these Letters begin as a comedy and end as a tragedy. The transition occurs in the tenth Letter. This very important distinction is frequently unobserved or neglected. If we compare the species of composition which are thus introduced, we shall be at a loss which most to admire, the "delicious irony" in one case, or the unparalleled sublimity in the other.

The prodigious effect produced by the earlier Provincial Letters, was, in great part, owing to the clear light in which they portrayed the miserable quibbles and evasions of the Jesuits. It were an error to suppose that the trickish logic of those fathers was never before understood in France. The Arnauds, father and son, had attacked them with all the vehemence of outraged virtue. But those sturdy Jansenists, unwisely endeavoring to thread the labyrinthine course of Jesuitical chicanery, and throw the light of truth along its windings, had wearied and discouraged their readers by tedious discussions, which few had patience to examine. But Pascal, disclosing to the reader, as by an "Open Sesame," the fallacy of each particular sophism, completes his work by a reductio ad absurdum. Never, however, is he content with a clear and unanswerable demonstration of his point. He leads his opponents into a position as ridiculous as it is inevitable. He lays down no formal premises. He deduces no formal conclusions. He uniformly views the sophistries of the Jesuits as below reason, and fit subjects for scorn and derision only. And yet, notwithstanding his aversion to employing argument upon such a topic, by a clear, conspicuous style, by an adroit, though simple and natural arrangement, by a striking juxtaposition of the incongruous statements of his opponents, and by a copious and judicious citation of Jesuit authorities, he conducts his readers along a train of reasoning