Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/530

 Everything Amiel molded in ready form—his lectures, treatises, verses—is dead; his diary, where, without thinking of form, he spoke with himself, is full of life, vigor, instruction, consolation, and will always remain one of the best books, such as have been unwittingly left to us by men like Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Epictetus.

Pascal said:—

"There are only three kinds of men : first, those who, finding God, serve Him; secondly, those who, not finding Him, are occupied in the search for Him; and thirdly, those who neither find Him nor seek for Him.

"The first are reasonable and happy; the last are unreasonable and unhappy; those between are unhappy but reasonable."

I think that the distinction established by Pascal between the first and the second classes,—between those who, as he says, finding God, serve Him with all their hearts, and those who, not finding Him, seek Him with all their hearts,—is not only not so great as he imagined, but does not even exist at all. I think that those who with all their hearts and with agony,—en gémissant, as Pascal says,—seek God, are already serving Him. They are serving Him by the fact that by these sufferings their searchings "trace out and open the way for others to reach God," as Pascal himself did in his "Thoughts," and as Amiel did all his life in his journal.

All Amiel's life, as it is presented to us in this journal, was full of this passionate, painful search for God; and the contemplation of this search is the more instructive that it never ceases to be a search, never pauses, never passes over into a consciousness of having discovered the truth, never into preaching.

Amiel never says to himself or to others, "I know the truth now; hear me!" On the contrary, it seems to him, as is characteristic of one who honestly seeks the truth, that the more he knows the more he needs to know, and he unceasingly does all he can to discover more and more of it, and then he is constantly conscious of his ignorance. He keeps conjecturing what