Note 148 — LETTER VI.

When Pascal speaks of alms-giving “working out our salvation,” it is evident that he regarded it only as the evidence of our being in a state of salvation. Judging by the history of his life, and by his “Thoughts on Religion,” no man was more free from spiritual pride, or that poor species of it which boasts of or rests in its eleemosynary sacrifices. His charity flowed from love and gratitude to God. Such was his regard for the poor that he could not refuse to give alms even though compelled to take from the supply necessary to relieve his own infirmities; and on his death-bed he entreated that a poor person should be brought into the house and treated with the same attention as himself, declaring that when he thought of his own comforts and of the multitudes who were destitute of the merest necessaries, he felt a distress which he could not endure. “One thing I have observed,” he says in his Thoughts—“that let a man be ever so poor, he has always something to leave on his death-bed.”