duce if only

But even to the eleventh hour we will not reform, and therefore we shall be not, I fear, reformed, but rudely mangled or overthrown by men as ignorant in their correction of abuses as some of us are in their maintenance of them. Periodical visitations of extreme severity have visited the Church and the world at different times, but to no human being is it given to anticipate which will be the final one of all. Only the lesson in all of them is the same. "If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" And in each of these successive' "comings" of our Lord, how little is the faith which He has found even among His professed followers! May He increase this faith in me, and those who are dearest to me, ere it be too late forever!

VIII. TOUR IN FRANCE.

Dover, August 11, 1837.

1. Twenty and twenty-two years ago I was backwards and forwards at this place, being then a young man with no wife or children, but with a mother whose house was my home, with a brother, aunt, and sisters. Ten, eight, and seven years ago, I used to be also passing often through here; I had then lost my dear brother, and latterly my dearest mother, and I had a wife and children; I had also a sister living here with her husband and children. Now, after another period of seven years, I am here once more; with no mother or aunt, with no remains left of my early home; my sister who did live here has lost her husband, and now lives at Rugby; but I have not only my dearest wife with me, but a more advanced stage of life- three dear children are with us, and their pens are all busy with their journals like their mother's and mine. So Dover marks very strikingly the several periods of my life, and shows me how large a portion of my space here I have already gone through.

Then for the world at large. When I first came here, it was so soon after Napoleon's downfall, that I remember hearing from one of the passengers in the packet the first tidings of Labedoyere's execution. At my second and third visits, the British army still occupied the North of France. My second period of coming here, from 1825 to 1830, marked the last period of the old Bourbon reign in France, and the old Tory reign in England. When I first landed here, it was

in the brief interval between the French and Belgian Revo lutions; it was just after the triumphant election of 1830 in England, which overthrew the ministry of the Duke of Wellington, and led to the Reform Bill. And now we seem to be witnessing the revival of Toryism in England, perhaps of the old Bourbon principles in part of France. The tide is turned, and will advance no higher till the next flood; let us only hope that its ebb will not be violent; and in the meanwhile our neighbors have got rid of the white flag, and we have got rid of the rotten boroughs of Schedule A. This is a clear gain; it is a question whether the positive good which either of us have gained, is equal to the positive evil which we have destroyed; but still in the course of this world, Seeva the destroyer is ever needed, and in our imperfect state, the very deliverance from evil is a gratification and a good.

On Saturday last we were at our delicious Westmoreland home, at that dear Fox How, which I love beyond all other spots of ground in the world, and expatiating on the summit of our familiar Fairfield. There, on a cloudless sky, we were beholding the noble outline of all our favorite mountains: The Old Man, Wetherlam, Bow Fell, Sca Fell, Great Gable, the Langdale Pikes, the Pillar, Grassmoor, Helvellyn, Place Fell, High Street, Hill Bell; there we saw Ulleswater and Coniston, and our own Winandermere, and there too we looked over a wide expanse of sea of the channel which divides England from Ireland. On Tuesday last we were at our dear Rugby home; seeing the long line of our battlements and our well-known towers backed by the huge elms of the schoolfield, which far overtopped them; and looking on the deep shade which those same elms, with their advanced guard of smaller trees and shrubs, were throwing over the turf of our quiet garden. And now, on Friday morning, we are at an inn at Dover, looking out on the castle and white cliffs which are so linked with a thousand recollections; beholding the sea, which is the highway from all the life of England to all the life of Europe, and beyond there stretches out the dim line of darker shadow which we know to be the very land of France.

And besides, in this last week, I have been at an Election; one of those great occasions of good or evil which are so largely ministered to Englishmen; an opportunity for so much energy, for so much rising beyond the mere selfishness of domestic interests, and the narrowness of mere individual or local pursuits; but an opportunity also for every base and bad passion,

for corruption, for fear, for tyranny, for malignity. Such is an election, and such is all human life; and those who rail against these double-handed appointments of God, because they have an evil handle as well as a good,* may desire the life of the Seven Sleepers, for then only can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when we lose all opportunities of doing or of becoming good. However, even as an occasion of evil, there is no doubt that our elections are like an inoculating for a disorder, and so mitigating; the party spirit and the feuds which now spend themselves in bloodless contests, would, if these were away, find a far more deadly vent; they solve that great problem how to excite a safe and regulated political activity.

We also in the course of the week have been travelling on the great railway from Manchester to Birmingham. The distance is ninety-five miles, which we accomplished in five hours. Nothing can be more delightful, as well as more convenient. It was very beautiful, too, to be taken, as it were, into the deepest retirement of the country, surprising lone farmhouses and out-lying copses with the rapid darting by of a hundred passengers, yet leaving their quiet unbroken; for no houses have as yet gathered on the line of the railway, and no miscellaneous passers at all times of the day and night serve to keep it ever in public. Only at intervals, four or five times a day, there rushes by the long train of carriages, and then all is as quiet as before.

We also passed through London, with which I was once so familiar, and which now I almost gaze at with the wonder of a stranger. That enormous city, grand beyond all other earthly grandeur, sublime with the sublimity of the sea or of mountains, is yet a place that I should be most sorry to call my home. In fact its greatness repels the notion of home; it may be a palace, but it cannot be a home. How different from the mingled greatness and sweetness of our mountain valleys; and yet he who were strong in body and mind, ought to desire rather, if he must do one, to spend all his life in London, than all his life in Westmoreland. For not yet can

"The Epicureans," he said, "did not meddle with politics, that they might be as quiet as possible from the strife of tongues. There are good people who do this now, remaining in willing ignorance of what is going on. But the mischief is, they cannot set their passions to sleep as they can their understanding; and when they do come to interfere, they are violent and prejudiced in proportion to their ignorance. Such men, to be consistent, hould live like Simon Styntes."

energy and rest be united in one, and this is not our time and place for rest, but for energy.

2.

Chartres, August, 1837.

Chartres was a very fine termination of our tour. We stopped at the Hotel du Grand Monarque, on an open space just at the outside of the town, and from thence immediately made our way to the Cathedral. The high tower, so celebrated all over France, is indeed remarkably beautiful, but the whole church far surpassed my expectations. The portails of both transepts are rich in figures as large as life, like the great portail at Rheims; the rose-windows over them are very rich, and the windows all over the church are most rich in painted glass. The size is great,a very essential element, I think, in the merits of a cathedral, — and all the back of the choir was adorned with groups of figures in very high relief, which had an extremely fine effect. These are all the proper and perpetual beauties of Chartres Cathedral: but we happen to see it on the Festival of the Assumption, when the whole church was full of people in every part, when the service was going on in the choir, and the whole building was ringing with the peals of the organ, and with the voices of the numerous congregation. Unchristian as was the service, so that one could have no sympathy with it in itself, yet it was delightful to contrast the crowded state of the huge building, nave, transepts, and aisles, all swarming with people, and the sharing of all in the service, — with the nakedness of our own cathedrals, where all, except the choir, is now merely a monument of architecture. There is no more provoking confusion to my mind than that which is often made between the magnificence and beauty of the Romish Church and its superstitions. No one abhors more than I do the essence of Popery, i. e. Priestcraft; or the setting up a quantity of human mediators, interpreters, between God and man. But this is retained by those false Protestants who call themselves High Churchmen; while they have sacrificed of Popery only its better and more popular parts; its beauty and its impressiveness. On the other hand, the Puritans and Evangelicals, whilst they disclaim Popery, undervalue the authority and power of the Church, not of the Clergy, and have a bibliolatry, especially towards the Old Testament, quite as foolish and as mischievous as the superstition of the Catholics. The open churches, the varied services, the beautiful solemnities,

the processions, the Calvaries, the crucifixes, the appeals to the eye and ear through which the heart is reached most effectually, have no natural connection with superstition. People forget that Christian worship is in its essence spiritual,

that is, it depends for its efficacy on no circumstances of time or place or form, but that Christianity itself has given us the best helps towards making our worship spiritual to us, that is, sincere and lively, by the visible images and signs which it has given us of God and of heavenly things, namely, the Person of the Man Christ Jesus, and the Sacraments.

To forbear, therefore, from all use of the Humanity of Christ, as an aid to our approaching in heart to the Invisible Father, is surely to forfeit one of the merciful purposes of the Incarnation, and to fall a little into that one great extreme of error, the notion that man can either in his understanding, or in his heart, approach to the Eternal and Invisible God, without the aid of a peoirns, or "interpres ;" (the English word, "Mediator," has become so limited in its sense that it does not reach to the whole extent of the case,) we want not an interpreter only, but a medium of communication, some middle point, in which the intelligible may unite with the perfections of the unintelligible, and so may prepare us hereafter to understand Him who is now unintelligible.

I think that this is important, for many reasons, both as regards Popery and our Pseudo-Popery, and Evangelicalism and Unitarianism. The errors of all four seem to flow out of a confusion as to the great truth of our need of a peoírns, and of the various ways in which Christ is our One μeoirηs, and that with infinite perfectness.

IX. TOUR IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.

Paris, July 14, 1839.

1. But really, when we went out on these leads, and looked down on the whole mass of the trees of the Tuileries' garden, forming a luxuriant green bed below us, and saw over them the gilded dome of the Invalids, and the mass of the Tuileries, and the rows of orange-trees, and the people sitting at their ease amongst them, and the line of the street not vanishing, as in London, in a thick cloud of smoke or fog, but with the white houses as far as the eye could reach distinct On the sky,—and that sky just in the western line of the

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