of the Chamber of Deputies, where his position may be briefly characterised by saying that he showed himself there as frankly Protestant as M. de Montalembert showed himself frankly Romanist, and won the respect of all. He afterwards took a prominent part in the formation of that "Free Church" of Protestant France, which certainly includes within it the most stirring and energetic members of the general body.

Now, if Calvinism in general exhibits mainly the individualist side of Christian doctrine-if the French Calvinistic Church, from the circumstances of its position as the Church of a long unrecognised and often persecuted minority, tends to bring out that individualist side with peculiar sharpness-if the like tendency results in the Swiss Church from the national position and characteristics of the Swiss people-it has been naturally carried to an extreme by the events in the midst of and in opposition to which the Vinet school of theology grew up, and by the special constitution of the "Free Church." Those who are in anywise familiar with the state of religion on the Continent, know that half a century ago an almost complete religious deadness spread over French Switzerland,-that Socinianism, following in the wake of despotic and aristocratic rule, established its very throne at Geneva. Against these two tendencies the aristocratic and the Socinian-a sort of cross-reaction took place. A coarse, vulgar democracy, devoid of all religious principle, copied from the lowest French models, of which M. James Fazy is the too successful embodiment, rose up against the old Genevese aristocracy, and threw it. A spring of earnest, self-devoted, thoughtful, sometimes learned, Christian faith welled out, and soon carried away, for all religious purposes, the dry bones of old Socinianism. Meanwhile a strange change was taking place. As each struggle was unfortunately carried on, in great measure, within separate spheres -as many of the religious reformers had not the insight to discern the political necessities of their age and

country, nor the political reformers the power to see that political reform, uninspired by religious faith, can end but in a mere change of machinery—it came to pass that the conquerors met in turn as opponents, whilst the conquered passed, so to speak, each to the service of the other conqueror. Religious reform became identified with political conservatism-political reform, with irreligion; old Socinianism easily ranging itself, under colour of the most absolute Erastianism, beneath the banners of democracy, in order to worst its opponents by means of the civil arm. Hence, though indeed even less in Geneva than in its neighbouring French and Protestant canton of Vaud, that shameless oppression of the Church by the majority which developed the "Free Church" of Vaud. And as Swiss democracy, blindly echoing the voice of French, had taken up the cry of Socialism-an idea which the Swiss character seems specially incapable of understanding-it followed that the religious reformers grew to embody in that word all the blasphemy, lawlessness, oppression which they saw around them. Socialism, as will be seen almost anywhere in Vinet's works, is for that admirable thinker a mere monster and portent. He is too much unnerved at sight of it ever to reach its root-idea, as being simply the effort to organize social relations, and to elevate that labour into a science and an art. He never stops to inquire whether the problem, how to conciliate the claims of society with those of the individual, may not occupy some of those socialists whom he inveighs against quite as much as himself. Socialism for him must be a dreadful conspiracy against individual freedom and worth; the very word of society, you would say, makes him almost shiver. To understand his vehemence, we must remember that for him, as taught by the lessons of daily experience, "society" meant in practice a knot of ignorant parish demagogues pretending to organize a Church; whilst "the individual" was the poor "pasteur" their victim.

Swiss democracy had been a bad copy

of French; the French "Free Church" was a somewhat better copy of the really heroic Swiss ones. It is founded, I heard it declared by one of its most eloquent champions, M. Pilatte, in one, certainly, of the very noblest sermons I ever heard,-not (as the words might seem to follow) on that foundation other than which, St. Paul tells us, hath no man laid, but upon "individual profession." It sets itself in direct opposition to the "churches of multitude," as it terms those that venture to hold God's revealed Will and Love a somewhat firmer foundation than the fleeting "profession" of man. For their behoof it has invented the contemptuous term of "multitudinism; individualism it openly glorifies; many of its members repelling the baptism of those infants, likeness to whom, we are told, makes us children of the kingdom. How many broader and nobler currents flow mingled with these, especially in the works of M. de Pressensé-how the sense of God's universal Fatherhood has taken root in what would otherwise seem an ungenial soil-how a deeper study of the Scriptures and of the fathers, a broader educational training, a wider outlook over men and things, have induced also a catholicity of spirit towards Romanism, towards even heathen creeds and philosophies, an acknowledgment of Christ's everlasting and universal working as the Light of the world in the minds and consciences of men, to which we are sadly unaccustomed in such quartershow openly the extreme consequences of Calvinistic doctrine have been protested against in this body, the latest offshoot of Calvinism-I have not here the space to show.

So much for the quarter whence Madame de Gasparin's works proceed. She has been long before the public as an author. I have before me the second edition, dated 1844, of her earliest work, "Marriage from a Christian point of view;" so that it must be sixteen years and more since she achieved her first success as an author. But that success was almost limited to the "religious" public. And, indeed, between

these early works and the two last, there is all the difference between the larva and the butterfly. None of them belong indeed quite to the class of those quarter or half-pounds of spiritual starch commonly called "good books," which are as incapable of alone nourishing the soul of man as material starch alone his body. But it was impossible to guess from them the high qualities which distinguish the last two; only in the latest predecessor of these, "Some Faults of the Christians of our Day"-full of searching and often caustic truth-can we now, looking back, discern, as in the ripened chrysalis, the folded wings which have since outspread themselves to the sun.

The "Near Horizons" went forth last year anonymously, not from any special Protestant book-shop, but from that of the great popular publishers of Paris, the Michel Lévys. The appeal thus made to a wider public than Madame de Gasparin had yet addressed was fully justified by the result. The value of the book was soon pointed out by the Revue des Deux Mondes, and ere this three editions have appeared. Yet the book hardly promised to be popular The "Near Horizons" are those of heaven itself. The various sketches of which the work consists mostly have death-beds for subjects, and a certain monotony thus runs through it, felt indeed only when it is read off at once, and which the freshness of feeling and language otherwise entirely keeps off. Yes, freshness; for after her sixteen years of authorship, it is only now that Madame de Gasparin, young no longer, has completely reached the expression of that quality. Freshness is the great charm of the book, as it is of its successor. You feel that you are dealing with one who has looked at nature, who has looked at religion, at first hand. So wondrous are the pictures of nature in the former, that it seems at first sight impossible they should have been written by any other than that sovran queen of French landscape painters in words, George Sand. And yet soon-apart from in

dications of fact or of doctrine which individual knowledge may suggest as decisive against the supposition-the very character of the style declares it impossible. George Sand's style is that of her favourite scenes of central France, with their fat plains or stretches of common, never undulating into more than hill and dale, with streams swift or sluggish, pebbly or clayey, but all unconscious of torrent or waterfall: so that she must leave Berry for Auvergne to find that "Black Town" which she was lately depicting to us; it is Rafaelesque or Mozartlike in its perfection, vehement without roughness, lofty without reaching to the sublime. Madame de Gasparin's style, on the contrary, is essentially a mountain style, hasty often and abrupt, now rushing like a torrent, now towering like a rock. Mountains too are a leading subject for her pen, with their ravines and their pine-trees,those Jura Mountains, which already, if I mistake not, have proved the main source of inspiration for Calame the landscape painter, but of which Madame de Gasparin may be called the first poet, as Rousseau was of the Alps.

Of Madame de Gasparin's powers of word-painting, take the following example :

"It is not yet the time for beautiful fungi,— those strange creations which sow the wood with their warm tints when October has

stripped the glades flowerless. They are queer characters, full of mystery. Some are honest, some vicious. I don't speak of the deadly ones, I mean the face, the bearing of them. Some delicate, milk-white, planted all in a ring, as if to mark the spot where the fairies danced last night. The others solitary, blackish, livid, traitor-faces ruminating some crime apart. These purple, doubled with orange, spreading forth the magnificence of their mantle in the midst of a crowd of grey buttons that hold themselves at a distance,-a pasha in his harem. Those with a silver lustre, smooth as silk, with a dome of satin above, and spotless ribbing beneath. Some are iridescent, some pale golden. How came they? how go they? What sun, when autumn mists grow heavy on the soil, what sun empurpled them, what painted them with sulphur, what gave them the rainbow reflections of motherof-pearl? Why does the cow that crops the latest plants, that twists off the leaves touched with the frost; why does the sheep wander

ing under the bare oak-trees leave them untouched? I know not."

The first sketch, "Lisette's Dream," the main charm of which lies, however, in its descriptions, is directed against what, in her next work, the writer will call "a Paradise which frightens one." Lisette, an old peasant-woman, has dreamed of Paradise-of a house of gold, bright as the sun of midday, wherein she saw a fair old lady, severe and yet sweet of mien, who sat and knitted in perfect bliss, but forbade her the door. She is frightened; such a vision of Paradise oppresses her. The writer comforts her with the remembrance of the thief on the cross.

"At this hour, since many a winter, Lisette has entered the house of gold.

"Does she knit, impassive, in beatitude, from age to age, beside the silver-haired matron? I think not; I believe her to be alive and active in heaven as upon earth. Cares have passed away; happiness beams immutable, supreme life reveals its mysteries to the ardent soul of Lisette."

"The Three Roses" represent three young girls dying before twenty. All three sketches are inimitable in their graceful tenderness. I will not spoil them by attempting to analyse, but will only detach the following paragraph :

"Little cries answer one another:

"Have you any?'-'Yes.'-'A good place?' Silence.

"There is no hunt in which selfishness displays itself better than in the hunt after lilies of the valley. One holds one's tongue. To say no would be lying; to say yes would be to lose one's find. One makes haste; if scrupulous, one makes a little murmur which pledges one to nothing; and the treasure once reaped, one creeps farther on, very far on, into some other odorous nest all sown with white bunches."

The "Tilery," as we may call it, takes its name from the description of an entirely secluded house, inhabited by a family of tile-makers, who take delight, the wife especially, in their loneliness. "The Hegelian" is a tale of 1849, placing before us, in striking contrast, the wild enthusiasm of German revolutionists, and the innocent bloodthirstiness of the reactionists :

"Shot,' cried the general. . . . Shot the chiefs shot the soldiers! shot the imbeciles

who let them alone.' As I named to him this one and that, the general, with an expressive gesture, took aim, winked, pulled the trigger, uttered his absurd 'shot,' and then laughed a big simpleton laugh."

It is

Amongst the other sketches, I would chiefly point out "The Poor Boy,"wonderfully beautiful all through,which gives the life of a grotesque idiot, maltreated by his father, till, in his last illness, the religious sense is kindled in him, and he dies in peace. "The Pigeon-house," is not "what you "think. There is no other pigeon"house but a poor room, no other pigeons "than an old man and his wife." the story of the last years of an old Lyonnese upholsterer, a good workman, but a shallow and weak mind, coming to Paris in the hope of finding work, with a wife, his good genius, to whom he is tenderly attached; and after various ups and downs, losing his wife and going off into semi-imbecility. Though away from her beloved mountains, the writer shows here a delicate truth of observation and firmness of touch which could not be surpassed. "Marietta," again, is a charming tale of a hideous, though gentle-souled dwarf, cared for with the most thoughtful delicacy by an old shoemaker, her cousin.

Very slight are for the most part these sketches, as, indeed, the writer warns us from the first. Their one great quality is, that they are all from nature, and by one who has eyes to see. But they have all of them a singular charm of style. The French of these Swiss writers, as M. Ste. Beuve has observed ere this, has always a pleasant archaic provincialism about it,—a smack of that sixteenth century, so various and so free, ere yet France had put on the periwig of the "Grand Siècle." This is remarkable, amongst other writers, in that charming teller of tales Rudolph Töpffer, the caricaturist schoolmaster, whose "Travels in Zigzag," though too lengthy, constituted, even before "Tom Brown," the first great literary homage paid to boy-nature. But apart from mere archaisms and provincialisms, the

style of Madame de Gasparin in her "Near Horizons" is full of words and expressions which have a sweet country smell about them, though the dialect is not the same as that with which George Sand has made us familiar. Very different, indeed, is the point of view of the Protestant authoress from that of her world-famous contemporary; not only as being strictly religious, but also under the social aspect. Here we have only glances cast from above, bright and loving indeed, but still not actual outlooks from that sphere of artizan and labourer life into which George Sand seems to have fairly penetrated. It is always the great lady, in town or country, going forth to help, to comfort, to speak of Christ, using, nobly and generously, her own social privileges for the benefit of others; it is not a soul oppressed with the weight of those very privileges, striving and struggling, even, it may be, at the cost of sin, to be one with the poorest and the lowest.

The "Heavenly Horizons" is, in its success, even a more remarkable work than its elder born. Again it has been reviewed in the Deux Mondes, by Emile Montegut, and with singular favour; again it has reached a third edition. Yet this deals no longer with nature's glories, even as vehicles for higher things, no longer sketches the sunlights or the shadows of human life. It is occupied all through directly with the highest, gravest subjects, death, heaven, immortality, resurrection, the new creation. If the writer's style has forgone the field of its charming rusticities, yet, struggling with mighty purposes, it becomes as it were even more picturesque than ever in its brave freedom, its bold abruptness. The cardinal idea of the book may be said to be a protest against the "Paradise which frightens one," a Paradise of absorption, or even of rest,-the "apocryphal Paradise" of the painters, of Dante, a "Chinese scene painted with strange "figures," as the writer somewhere calls it. That the soul does not sleep, that personal identity subsists after death, that affections are eternal, such are the

points on which the writer exhausts her most incisive arguments.

"Who made our affections? God or the devil? Forgive me my precision of terms. Now if God put affections into us Himself; if He judged His work as good, will He judge it as bad all of a sudden, on such a day? He who endowed the earth with attachments so mighty and so sweet, could He disinherit heaven of them? Easily could He have placed us in an atmosphere of uniform and I will say tasteless love, like in all, equal for all, an ocean islandless and shoreless. He has not done it. Men have imagined this, not God.

"Men think monotony great. God finds it poor. Just take away from man his preferences. Behold, he loves all things and all men with identical feelings; his father no more nor less than the generality of old men; that unknown child quite like his own. Friends he has none; or rather you, I, a stranger, the Grand Turk at need, we are his friends, in the same degree, in the same manner. man is not a man; I see in him arms, legs, I discover no heart. And if really he is alive, if it be not an automaton, I say that loving all he loves nothing, that I care little for his general tendernesses, and that I would rather be the neighbour's cat than his wife or his son.

This

"Yet this is how men settle heaven, these are the guests with which they people it. "Oh, how differently God has made it, how differently He has made man!

God has created the family, which man would not have invented, which in the savage state he annihilates, which in the excesses of corrupt civilization he ceases to acknowledge, which most of our philosophies dissolve. God has strongly bound the sheaf, the man to his wife, the father to his child. And when with a word Paul would depict Roman degradation, he writes, 'Men without natural affections.'

"Yes, there are families up yonder, united by indissoluble links, each loving the other with a love more solid than earth has known. No selfishness narrows it, no unfaithfulness befouls it; neither does the ambition of power stifle it, nor the passion of gold dry it up: it renews itself without ceasing in the worship of God, and that worship quenches it not, but makes it shine eternally like itself.

Yet Jesus has said that in heaven there is no taking nor giving of women in marriage.

"Doubtless. Another condition, other relations. Our earthly marriage has consequences which future life could not admit of. What is transitory ceases, what is immortal subsists. Now Christian love is immortal.

"To convince yourself of this, admit the contrary for an instant. Represent to yourself Abraham, that mighty individuality," (Oh, Madame de Gasparin !) "without Sarah, that other individuality," (Oh!) "so closely

bound to his own. Go a step further; imagine Jacob indifferent to Rachel. He meets her, the gentle beloved, the companion of his pilgrimages, he meets her in this Paradise of uniform tints. No names more, no touching memories, no tenderness. He meets her, and unmoved in eye, unmoved in thought, he glides beside her. A soul taken at haphazard inspires him with the like love. The mother of Joseph, the mother of Benjamin, he feels nothing towards her which he does not feel in the same degree for any other inhabitant of heaven. Ah! she whom weeping he laid on the road to Bethlehem, she remains there still. Both are dead. The beings whom in higher regions you call yet Rachel, Jacob, have nothing in common with the hearts which burned here below with a love at once so divine and so human. I recognise them no

more.

*

"Be it so. But with the persistency of the affections you introduce sorrow into Paradise. All whom you love, will they have a place there? Are you sure of finding them there? A father, a child....

"I fall at thy feet, my God! I fall with a cry which is an act of faith. Thou wilt save them, Thou wilt fetch them; beneath Thy fervent love all hardening of heart shall melt. If it should be otherwise! . . . My God, have pity on me! I know that Thou lovest them; I know that Thou wilt wipe away my tears; I believe with all my soul that Thou wilt not wipe them away whilst narrowing my heart. Thou comfortest by giving; Thou takest Dought away of that which is good, that which Thyself hast found very good. And then, behold a mystery: Thyself, O God, from the bosom of Thine immutable felicity, Thou seest those that have lost themselves. Yet Thy Love and Thy Charity remain; Thou hast not sacrificed Thy love to Thy felicity. Veiled harmonies these, but of which I hear the far-off echo.

"What Thy omniscience did for Thee, Thy compassions will do for me.

"My love shall not die. Struck all along the road, covered with wounds, not thus shall I enter the kingdom of God; bleeding and maimed. The God before whom despair takes flight will not chase it away by dispersing to the four winds the ashes of my recollections. Indifference shall not cure me of sorrow. My God has other remedies for suffering which has just loved.

"My tendernesses will live, Lord, as Thy love, as Thy tendernesses. Thy heart, Jesus risen from the dead, is my warrant for my heart's vitality."

In the earlier pages of her book, Madame de Gasparin says, that she only speaks to those whom she terms "the redeemed," those who have felt their guilt and their impotency, and have