The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

by Blaise Pascal

Our prayers and our virtues are abomination before God if they are not the prayers and the virtues of Jesus Christ. And our sins will never be the object of the mercy, but of the justice of God, if they are not those of Jesus Christ.

He has adopted our sins, and has admitted us into covenant with him, for virtues are his own, and sins are strange to him; while virtues are strange to us, and sins are our own.

Let us change the rule which we have hitherto adopted for judging what is good. We have had our own will as our rule in this respect, let us now take the will of God, all that he wills is good and right to us, all that he wills not is evil.

All that God allows not is forbidden; sins are forbidden by the general declaration that God has made, that he allows them not. Other things which he has left without general prohibition, and which for that reason are said to be permitted, are nevertheless not always permitted; for when God removes any one of them from us, and when, by the event, which is a manifestation of the will of God, it appears that God allows not that we should have a thing, that is then forbidden to us as sin, since the will of God is that we should not have one more than the other. There is this sole difference between these two things, that it is certain God will never allow sin, while it is not certain that he will never allow the other. But so long as God allows it not, we must look upon it as sin, so long as the absence of God's will, which alone is all goodness and all justice, renders it unjust and evil.

True Christians nevertheless submit to folly, not because they respect folly, but the commandment of God, who for the punishment of men has put them in subjection to their follies. Omnis creatura subjecta est vanitati. Liberabitur. Thus Saint Thomas explains the passage in Saint James on giving place to the rich, that if they do it not in the sight of God the commandment of religion is set at naught.

All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life, but among all those which the world has invented none is so much to be feared as the theatre. It is so natural and so delicate a representation of the passions that it moves them, and makes them spring up in our heart, above all that of love, principally when it is represented as very chaste and very honourable. For the more innocent it seems to innocent souls, the more are they capable of being touched by it; its violence pleases our self-love, which at once forms the desire of causing the same effects which we see so well represented, and at the same time we make for ourselves a conscience founded on the honour of the feelings which we see there. And this extinguishes the fear of pure souls which imagine there is no harm to purity in loving with a love which seems to them so moderate.

Thus we leave the theatre with our heart so full of all the beauty and tenderness of love, the soul and the mind so persuaded of its innocence, that we are fully prepared to receive its first impressions, or rather to seek occasion to let them be born in the heart of some one, in order that we may receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices which we have seen so well depicted in the theatre.

The circumstances in which it is easiest to live according to the world are those in which it is most difficult to live according to God, and vice versâ. Nothing is so difficult according to the world as the religious life; nothing is more easy according to God. Nothing is easier than to live in great office and great wealth according to the world; nothing is more difficult than to live in them according to God, and not to take part in them and love them.

Those who believe without having read the Old and New Testaments, do so because they have a saintly frame of mind, with which all that they hear of our Religion agrees. They feel that a God has made them; their will is to love God only, their will is to hate themselves only. They feel that they have no power of themselves, that they are unable to come to God, and if God come not to them, they can have no communion with him. And they hear our Religion declare that men must love God only, and hate self only, but that all being corrupt, and unfit for God, God made himself man to unite himself to us. No more is needed to convince men who have such a disposition and have a knowledge of their duty and of their incompetence.

Those whom we see to be Christians without the knowledge of the prophecies and evidences, are able to judge of their religion as well as those who have that knowledge. They judge of it by the heart, as others by the understanding. God himself inclines them to believe, and thus they are effectually persuaded.