ment to come to confirmation and the communion at an ap pointed age. Perhaps the young man is the support of his family, and in this case he may be shut out from employment if he have not performed the sacred act, without which he will hardly be able to gain bread for the subsistence of his parents. Be his own life upright or debauched, be his principles religious or infidel, be the Church true or false, he must enter it, he must accomplish the solemn formality, and the sooner the better, in order for his successful entrance into the active world.

Hence, by a singular perversion, this profession of piety by "the act of Confirmation," comes to be regarded by many as an "act of emancipation," a sort of absolution to sin. A father in the National Church, hearing his son use blasphemous language, reproved him thus: Miserable boy! you have not yet communicated, and you swear like a pagan! And it is not unusual for mothers to refuse permission to their daughters to mingle in the gay amusements of the world, because, say they, they are still under religious instruction, and have not yet communicated! Thus the most important of all religious rites, that which constitutes the solemn profession of a Christian, becomes a compulsory act even for the greatest unbelievers. A class of catechumens at Geneva celebrated the day of their admission to the Lord's Supper by a shameful debauch! This is but the legitimate consequence of setting religion in a dependence on the State. Intolerance and irreligion are just as sure to follow, as they do when you give to the Church the power of the State, and thus tempt her to persecute.

The sole remedy and safe-guard is this: Keep the Church and State separate. Leave the conscience alone with God. Leave the Church in her dependence on the Word of God only, the Grace of Christ only, and the Work of the Spirit only. Here is light and liberty, glory and power.

CHAPTER XVII.

LOWER VALLEY OF AOSTE INTO IVREA AND TURIN.

Or all my wanderings beneath the shadow of Mont Blanc, no excursion was more excitingly beautiful than a return walk by

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moonlight from the city of Aoste across the Grand St. Bernard, and back again to Chamouny. I shall interpose it here, because, though in actual time it did not come within the Tour of Mont Blanc, which we are now making, it is, nevertheless, one of its unities, though like a wild dream interposed between the realities of day.

It

I was on my way from Turin to Chamouny. We had left that charming Piedmontese city at noon, for Ivrea, in the diligence. The beauty of ride, especially when we began to enter on the confines of the mountains, was quite indescribable. was the commencement of harvest season in September. The softness and luxuriance of the landscape, the abundance of fruits, flowers, and foliage, the fields entering on their autumnal richness, the carts pressed down with sheaves for the harvest-home, the hilarity of the peasantry, the goodly fruitage, the fragrant odours, and the bright light and sweetness of the Italian climate, made this one of the pleasantest parts of the year for such an excursion. All nature was laughing with plenty

Ivrea is a walled market-town twelve leagues from Turin containing about 8000 inhabitants, and occupying a most picturesque and lovely defile on the banks of the Doire. The scene by moonlight on the waters of this river, and from the bridge, by which you enter the town, might have tempted Raphael from Rome with his canvass. The place is the gate to the Val d'Aoste, which extends about 75 miles, in one continued winding way of loveliness and sublimity, up to the very glaciers of Mont Blanc. Through this valley Napoleon fought his way to Marengo, in the year 1800, and Hannibal of old came down by this pass of beauty into Italy, both of them beholding the scenery not through the green and peaceful colouring of nature, but through the red and smoky atmosphere of Earlier still, this town of Ivrea is recorded to have been a slave-mart for selling the conquered inhabitants of the country-the brave old Salassi-36,000 at once, by the Romans under Varro.

war.

Nature writes nothing of all this upon the rocks and rivers; but if the spirits of those armies, with their generals, could pass by moonlight now through this region of silent, unchanged II tuffat

12

beauty, they would see nothing but this. Not the present, but the past, would be before them, in processions more terrible by far than glittering squadrons, with whole parks of brazen throated artillery. How many places, which the traveller passes without thought, must constitute to some beings a memoria technica of a power almost as dread as to Cain's own mind would have been the spot where the earth drank the blood of Abel!

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There are many," remarks John Foster, "to whom local associations present images, which they fervently wish they could forget; images which haunt the places where crimes have been perpetrated, and which seem to approach and glare on the criminal as he hastily passes by, especially if in the evening, or the night. No local associations are so impressive as those of guilt. It may here be observed, that as each has his own separate remembrances, giving to some places an aspect and significance, which he alone can perceive, there must be an unknown number of pleasing, or mournful, or dreadful associations, spread over the scenes inhabited or visited by men. any awakened consciousness by the bridge, or the wood, or the house, where there is something to excite the most painful or frightful ideas in the next man that shall come that way, or possibly the companion that walks along with us. How much there is in a thousand spots of the earth, that is invisible and silent to all but the conscious individual!"

"I hear a voice you cannot hear;

I see a hand you cannot see.”

We pass without

All places that recall injuries done to others, or to ourselves, or to God, must be, to the heart that hath not been visited with Repentance, the habitation of Remorse. Nemesis dwells there, and Erinnys with her snakes. Nor is there any help for this, but in the mercy of Jesus Christ; nothing that will remove the red images of avenging Justice from the mind but the washing of the guilty soul in the blood of the slain Lamb. Blessed be God, that will do it for the chief of sinners.

"There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Immanuel's veins,

LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS.

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains."

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gran

Leaving out Mont Blanc, the romantic wildness and grandeur of the Valley from Ivrea up to Aoste, about fifteen leagues are more exciting than the other half of the way from Aoste to Courmayeur. There is the utmost luxuriance combined with sublimity, and savage desolation with beauty. Rich vines are trellised amidst rocks, hanging out their purple fruit over the precipices. The torn and thunder-rifted gorge at Fort Bard and beyond, is almost equal in wildness to the Via Mala in the passage of the Splugen. Precipices rise above you into perpendicular mountains, while a village hangs in the moonlight beneath the parapet of the road on the other side, and beyond and below the village, rushes the river. The combination of Italian and almost tropical vegetation with the deur of these mountains, is what especially strikes the mind. Fort Bard appears like a white castle hanging in the air. It was such an impregnable position, crowning a pile of crags, over which alone there was any possibility of passing up or down the valley, that the Austrians, who held it in 1800, were very near checking the progress of Napoleon, and so routing his army before the battle of Marengo. But the fort must be carried. Some hundreds of daring soldiers scaled the dangerous and almost inaccessible mountain of the Albaredo, overhanging the castle, and there, with a single cannon, silenced the dread battery which prevented all approach to the passage. Then, in the conflict at midnight, the soldiers in the fort, under the fire of another cannon, which was poured over their heads from a belfrey near the gate, were compelled to surrender, and so the storm of victory passed on, to burst upon the plains of Italy.

At one of the small villages on our route, two young girls took passage for Aoste, whom I could not but admire for the modesty and beauty of their faces and manners. I had taken the front seat or coupèe of the coach, for the sake of clear vision; they were obliged to take the same, because there was none other left, the cool night air keeping the inside seats full. They seemed unwilling to acknowledge any disposition to sleep,

but at length the youngest of the two fell asleep on her sister's arms, and the elder reclined and slept against the corner. When they awoke, they betook themselves to their devotions, and it was affecting to witness the simplicity and earnestness with which, whenever we passed an image of the Virgin by the roadside, they crossed themselves and prayed. Is it not sad to have this strong religious tendency, this yearning after the repose of the soul in faith, turned thus from its rightful object, and perverted into a sinful superstition? O, if the Gos pel could be clearly preached in Italy, how would the people, the common people, flock to the joyful sound! If Christ could there be lifted up, he would draw all men unto him. The Scribes and Pharisees would rage, undoubtedly, but the common people would hear him gladly, as of old. Well! the time is coming.

Have you ever been travelling in the diligence by night through a lovely country, and experienced the dilemma of the conflict between sleeping and walking at that hour of prime, when the dawn is breaking, and all the processes of nature are so exquisitely beautiful, that you wish for every sense to be on the alert to watch them? At length you decide the matter by getting out in the cool morning twilight, and walking till your frame is warm with exercise, and your eyes are opened. A delicious cup of coffee awaits you at the next post, and you feel refreshed as if the diligence had been to you a comfortable elastic mattrass, or, at the worst, a bed of heather in the wilderness, from which you rose to see the pale brow of the morning, as saith Dante, looking o'er the eastern cliff, lucent with jewels.

"Where we then were,

Two steps of her ascent the night had past,
And now the third was closing up its wing,
When I, who had so much of Adam with me,
Sank down upon my couch, o'ercome with sleep."

But the morning air is gently stirring the dew-laden leaves towards the breaking dawn, and bidding them drop their coro net of pearls upon the grass, in honour of the approaching sun,