Page:Blaise Pascal works.djvu/271

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE PROPHECIES
263

732

“…Then they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, saying, Here is the Lord, for God shall make Himself known to all.

“…Your sons shall prophesy.” “I will put my spirit and my fear in your heart.”

All that is the same thing. To prophesy is to speak of God, not from outward proofs, but from an inward and immediate feeling.

733

That He would teach men the perfect way.

And there has never come, before Him nor after Him, any man who has taught anything divine approaching to this.


734

…That Jesus Christ would be small in His beginning, and would then increase. The little stone of Daniel.

If I had in no wise heard of the Messiah, nevertheless, after such wonderful predictions of the course of the world which I see fulfilled, I see that He is divine. And if I knew that these same books foretold a Messiah, I should be sure that He would come; and seeing that they place His time before the destruction of the second temple, I should say that He had come.


735

Prophecies.—That the Jews would reject Jesus Christ, and would be rejected of God, for this reason, that the chosen vine brought forth only wild grapes. That the chosen people would be faithless, ungrateful, and unbelieving, populum non credentem et contradicentem.[1] That God would strike them with blindness, and in full noon they would grope like the blind; and that a forerunner would go before Him.


736

Transfixerunt. Zech. xii. 10.

That a deliverer should come, who would crush the

  1. Isaiah, lxv. 2; Romans, x. 21.