at Geneva, had dwelt in the same house with him, and studied in the same school. He received for answer, the assurance that the King remembered him very well, but that he could not hinder the free course of justice.

At length, after having waited a long time in vain for his sentence in prison-all bail being refused to him-he was brought before the Senate of Chambery, and there condemned to a year's farther imprisonment, a fine of a hundred pieces of gold, and to pay besides, the expenses of the process. The infamous treatment would have been still worse, had it not been for his personal relations with the King, and the interference of some persons of high rank.

The treatment which this Minister of the Gospel received while in prison was severe and cruel. They only who may have visited the interior of a prison in a Romish country, and especially in Italy, can imagine what M. Pache must have suffered. During considerable space of time he was shut up in the same cell with eight banditti! A man of admirable education, of refined manners, a companion of the studies of the King, resorting to the baths of Aix for his health, is taken sick from his bed, and shut up in a foul, infected dungeon, with corrupt and disgusting villains, where he cannot enjoy one moment's repose, nor even a corner to himself, but day and night is surrounded with filthy creatures, covered with vermin! All this for giving away a religious tract, at the wily instigation of the priest himself!

With all this, it will scarcely be believed that out of this monstrous piece of persecution and deceit the Romish Church arro gated to herself the praise of great tolerance! After M. Pache had suffered in prison nine or ten months, the Bishop of Strasburg interfered in his favor by a pompous letter, which spoke of "the pity and compassion of the Church," and pretended to implore mercy and deliverance for a heretic justly condemned! This was really adding mockery and insult to the punishment; but, at length, just as the period of imprisonment for their victim was expir ing, M. Pache was set at liberty in consideration of the application of the bishop. Of course this was applauded as a proof of the compassion of the Romish Church, which may well pretend to be merciful, when its very acts of persecution can be turned,

by the ingenuity of the priests, into the strongest and most popular proofs of its tolerance. Who can wonder at the appellations bestowed in the Scriptures upon such a Church? Mystery of Iniquity, Mother of Abominations, and Man of Sin!

I am bound to add, that, towards the end of his imprisonment, M. Pache obtained a remarkable alleviation of its miseries, in consequence of his former friendship with the King, and the solicitations and measures of some personages of high rank. He obtained the favor of being transferred from the dungeon where he was surrounded by such a band of malefactors, and was put into another cell, in company with a murderer! This was a pleasant companion for a sick man and a clergyman, and a new proof of the compassions of the Romish Church, in consenting so wonderfully to ameliorate the position of a heretic.

The original account of this most iniquitous procedure may be found in the Archives du Christianisme. My informant adds that M. Pache was condemned in virtue of a law which forbids the circulation of the Scriptures and of Tracts in the States of the King of Sardinia. If the inhabitants of Savoy have rightly informed me, he says there is in force in that country a law called "the Law of Blasphemy," which annexes the penalty of five years in the galleys to every attack made against the Romish religion. He had himself passed a village in the mountains, where a man was condemned to two years in the galleys, for speaking ill of the Virgin Mary!

What a country is this! what despotism of the priesthood! what degradation and trembling servitude of the people! Surely, every man having the least regard for freedom and piety is bound to exert himself to the uttermost against such a system of intolerance. It is time it were brought to an end-for the whole creation, where it exists, groaneth and travaileth in bondage under it.

There are two great forms of this bondage of Antichrist,—the Church, absorbing the State, as in the government of the Papacy, and violently preventing men from worshipping according to their conscience; and a State absorbing the Church, as is the case with almost every State and Church establishment, and compelling men to acts of religious profession and worship, when conscience tells

them it is all hypocrisy. It is nothing less than sacrilege and simony, which thus springs from permitting the State to prescribe, enforce, or sustain, as a civil right and duty, the form of worship in the Church. Take the instance so forcibly described by Col. Tronchin, of the young man compelled by the laws of the Genevese National Establishment to come to confirmation and the communion at an appointed 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.

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

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 the ride, especially when we began to enter on the confines of the mountains, was quite indescribable. It 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 odors, and the bright light and sweetness of the Italian climate, made this one of the pleasantest parts of the year for such an excursion. ΑΡ nature was laughing with plenty.

Ivrea is a walled market-town, twelve leagues from Turin, containing about 8,000 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 exterils 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 coloring of nature, but through the red and smoky atmosphere of war. 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.

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 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!

"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 a 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. We pass without 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."

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 Re