I cannot resolve this doubt.



VIII.


I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's _Port Royal_, a book I have often
thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that
period, always held me aloof. Happily, chance and mood came together,
and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth acquiring. It is the
kind of book which, one may reasonably say, tends to edification. One is
better for having lived a while with "Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best
of them were, surely, not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are among
theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the
early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which
seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint
of mortality.

A gallery of impressive and touching portraits. The great-souled M. de
Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre, who, at
the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to meditation and
penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs, his conflicts of
soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good Lancelot, ideal
schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical books; the vigorous
Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-suffering for the faith
that was in him; and all the smaller names--Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole,
Hamon--spirits of exquisite humility and sweetness--a perfume rises from