RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND POWER.

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ed with power over the State, or with the use of the State to enforce her rubrics or her teachings; for the Church also, sooner or later, acts the tyrant, when tempted to it. The temptation comes under the guise of an angel, under the plausible pretence of uniformity in worship, and the advancing of the Redeemer's kingdom. So much the more dangerous it is, so much the more earnestly and carefully to be repelled. Religion is a voluntary thing, both in form and doctrine. Let every State and every Church respect it as such, and cease from enforcing it, and leave to Christianity

The Word of God ONLY,

The Grace of Christ ONLY,

The Work of the Spirit ONLY,

and then intolerance and strife will cease, truth and love will prevail, error will die out of existence, and throughout all nations the kingdom of Christ will come.

CHAPTER LV.

LAKE OF URI AND TOWN OF LUCERNE.

FROM Altorf a short walk brings you to Fluellen, the low unhealthy part of the Reuss Valley, on the celebrated Lake of Lucerne. You embark, morning or evening, in the steamer for the town of Lucerne at the other end, to enjoy a sail amidst the almost unequalled scenery and unrivalled historical associations by which it is surrounded. You embark where Gessler embarked, with Tell in chains, you pass the table rock, where Tell leaped on shore from the tempest and the tyrant, and sprang lightly up the mountains; also the little chapel erected in the year 1380 by the men of Uri to his memory and the memory of his escape, thirty-one years after his death, while one hundred and fourteen individuals were still living, who had known the hero personally; you pass the sacred field of Grutli, where the midnight oath was taken by the patriots. The scenery is in keeping with the associations, the associations with the scenery. Assuredly the Lake is one of the sublimest

in the world; it is useless attempting to describe it, or the mountains that rise in such amazing grandeur out of it, or the bays that in such exquisite beauty allure you to explore its winding recesses.

One of the precipitous Alps whose foundations it conceals, shows, high up in the air, a white scar where a fragment of rock 1200 feet wide broke from the mountain and fell into the Lake in the year 1801, raising such a wave in its fall, that at the distance of a mile a hamlet was overwhelmed and five houses destroyed by it, with the loss of a number of lives. The size of this fragment, though the scar in the mountain looks so inconsiderable, may serve to direct the traveller's measurement of those huge avalanches, which at the distance of leagues look so enormous on the Jungfrau, and which on other mountains have buried whole villages and swept whole forests in their way.

Lucerne is a picturesque and lovely village situated like Geneva at the effluence of a sea-green river from an azure lake, and having many of the constituents of beauty and romance that make Geneva such an earthly paradise, and some elements of originality that Geneva does not possess. There is no Mont Blanc, hanging its piles of snow in the heavens on one side, nor any Jura range, skirting the golden sunset sky and shadowy earth with its green fringe on the other; but there are grand and varied mountains, gazing into the crystal depths; there is an arrowy river, dividing the town, having journeyed all the way through heroic lands down the valley of the St. Gothard from a little tarn among the mountain summits; there are picturesque old feudal walls and watch-towers; there are long bridges, which are covered galleries of antique paintings; and there are many points of interest and of beautiful scenery, with wild wood-walks, and sudden openings, and rich panoramas, where morning wakes the world to music and beauty, and where at evening the western clouds, mountains, groves, orchards, and all the shadow-dappled foliage, burn richly in "the slant beams of the sinking sun."

REGION OF LUCERNE.

Of hilly fields and meadows, and the lake

With some fair bark perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two isles
Of purple shadow."

Here a man, whose misfortune it may have been to be born in the heartless heart of some great city, might, if it were not for the demon of intolerance, find a spot for his family, to grow up quietly under all the influences of nature. And if he have a dear child like the Poet's, here he may muse, whether amidst the Frost at Midnight, or the summer stars, and watching the slumbers of his cradled infant, may say,

"Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought,
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze,
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great Universal Teacher! He shall mould

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whither the eave-drops fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of Frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the shining moon."

I say, were it not for the demon of intolerance, the binding of the conscience in the fetters of Church and State.

This is

the pest that still afflicts Switzerland, worse by far than the scourge of Cretinism and the goitre, and accompanied, in this region of Lucerne, with an unaccountable passion for the Jesuits, whose teachings in morality and political science are so at war with the immemorial freedom of Tell's mountains. Lucerne is one of the three towns, with Berne and Zurich, where the confederative Diet holds its sessions. It is styled "Town and Republic," having a Council of One Hundred for its government, divided into a daily Council of thirty-six, and the larger Council of sixty-four, the whole Hundred meeting every three years, or, if the daily Council require it, oftener. At the head of the Council is a Chief Magistrate, called the Avoyer. The number of inhabitants in the town is about 8000 Romanists, and two hundred Protestants, the Protestants being excluded from all participation in the rights of citizens, and only admitted on sufferance. How different from the manner in which we receive Romanists in our own country! When will the example of equal citizenship among all religionists be followed abroad by Romanists towards Protestants?

There is an arsenal in Lucerne well worth visiting for its historical trophies. Here you may see the very shirt of mail in which Duke Leopold of Austria was struck down at the great battle of Sempach. There is also the monument of Thorwaldsen to the memory of the Swiss guards, one of the finest things of the kind in the world, one of the few monuments of simple grandeur and pathos speaking at once to the heart, and needing neither artist nor critic to tell you it is beautiful. There are the curious old bridges, like children's picture-books, amusing you much in the same manner, where indeed you can scarcely get across the bridge, you are so taken with examining the rude old sketches. There are all the scenes of the Old Testament hanging above you, as you pass one way, and all the scenes of the New as you pass the other. This Scriptural bridge was 1380 feet in length, and when you are tired with looking at the pictures, you may rest your eyes by leaning on the parapet, and gazing over the lovely Lake, with the sail-boats flitting across it, and the distant mountains towering above it. In the roof of another bridge are represented the

heroic passages of native Swiss history, and in yet another the whole curious array of Holbein's Dance of Death.

Wordsworth says truly that "these pictures are not to be spoken of as works of Art, but they are instruments admirably answering the purpose for which they were designed." And indeed when they were first painted, and for a long time after, how deep must have been the impression made by them on the people's mind and especially the hearts of the children. Fathers and mothers with their little ones in hand, from far and near, wandered up and down in these picture-books of the history of Christ and of the country, telling their stories and their lessons. It was a singular conception, and a very happy one, "turning common dust into gold," and inviting every passen. ger of the bridge to get more than the value of his toll (if ever there was any) by thinking on his pilgrimage. Wordsworth says that the sacred pictures are 240 in number. beautiful, produced by the remembrance of them.

"One after one its Tablets that unfold
The whole design of Scripture history;
From the first tasting of the fatal Tree,
Till the bright star appeared in eastern skies,
Announcing One was born mankind to free;
His acts, his wrongs, his final sacrifice;
Lessons for every heart, a Bible for all eyes.

'Long may these homely works devised of old,
These simple efforts of Helvetian skill,
Aid, with congenial influence, to uphold
The State, the Country's destiny to mould;
Turning, for them who pass, the common dust
Of servile opportunity to gold;

Filling the soul with sentiments august,

His lines are

The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just!"

Mount Pilatus is the Storm King of the Lake, always brewing mischief; and a good reason for it, according to the strange old legend that he who washed his hands of Chi'st's blood before all the people, and yet delivered him up to the people, drowned himself in a black lake on the top of the mountain. How he came to be there is accounted for by his being banished into Gaul by Tiberius, and into the mountains by Conscience. There still his vexed spirit wanders, and invites the tempest.