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 The answer is surely obvious. He was a sincere, a humble, and even an abject believer precisely because he was a thorough-going sceptic. One point must be touched, however, though it cannot be elaborated. The obvious objection to an appeal to the heart is that the answer is necessarily what is called subjective: is satisfactory to the believer, but to the believer alone: the‘will to believe'—as Professor W. James calls it in a recent essay, where he modifies and in some sense rehabilitates Pascal's bet—implies that you believe what you will. I choose to believe this, and you choose to disbelieve it. There is no reconciliation. The Hindu fakir can persuade himself of the enmity of Vishnu as the Christian monk of the divinity of the Saviour. Holy water was used by Pagans as well as by Catholics. Pascal was partly blinded to this by the smallness of the world in his time. He saw as a mathematician that man was between two infinites. Geometry makes us sensible of the fact. But 'history' still meant a mere six thousand years. The Catholic Church could still represent itself to the historian as the central phenomenon of all human history, not as an institution which dates but from a geological yesterday, and peculiar to a special group of