knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want
of knowing where they must judge.

    269. Submission is the use of reason in which consists true
Christianity.

    270. Saint Augustine.- Reason would never submit, if it did not
judge that there are some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is
then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit.

    271. Wisdom sends us to childhood. Nisi efficiamini sicut
parvuli.*

    * Matt. 18. 3. "Except ye become as little children."

    272. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal
of reason.

    273. If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have
no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of
reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

    274. All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling.

    But fancy is like, though contrary to, feeling, so that we
cannot distinguish between these contraries. One person says that my
feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have
a rule. Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and
thus there is no rule.

    275. Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they
believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

    276. M. de Roannez said: "Reasons come to me afterwards, but at
first a thing pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason,
and yet it shocks me for that reason which I only discover
afterwards." But I believe, not that it shocked him for the reasons
which were found afterwards, but that these reasons were only found
because it shocked him.

    277. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We
feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the
Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives
itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at
its will. You have rejected the one and kept the other. Is it by
reason that you love yourself?

    278. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.
This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

    Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a
gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith.
They only give reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not
bring them to it.

    279. Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was
a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith.
They only gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not
bring them to it.

    280. The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

    281. Heart, instinct, principles.

    282. We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart,
and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and
reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The
sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose.
We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us
to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness
of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our
knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time,
motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from
reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and
must base them on every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of
the tri-dimensional nature of space and of the infinity of number, and
reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is
double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are
inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is
as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of
her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the
heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated
propositions before accepting them.

    This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason,
which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only
reason were capable of instructing us. Would to God, on the
contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by
instinct and intuition! But nature has refused us this boon. On the
contrary, she has given us but very little knowledge of this kind; and
all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.

    Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition
are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not
have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give
them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and
useless for salvation.

    283. Order.- Against the objection that Scripture has no order.