CHAPTER XL.

Natural Theology of the Splugen.

Now, dear friend, what thinkest thou of the moral of this stupendous scene in the preceding chapter? Dost thou set down this mountain-rift, in thy natural theology, as a chapter of the scars and vestiges of sin, one of the groans of nature in this nether world, wrung out by man's fall? Or is it to thee an instructive, exalting, exciting scene of Power, magnificently grand, almost as if thou hadst witnessed the revealed Arm of Omnipotence, and lifting thy heart, mind, soul, thy whole being, up to God?

Methinks you answer, that if God meant the world to be a great solemn palace for the teaching of his children, on the very walls of which there should be grand inscriptions and hieroglyphics productive of great thoughts, rousing the mind from slumber, rearing the imagination with a noble discipline, he would have scattered here and there just such earthquake-rifts of power and grandeur. We are immortal children in the school-house of our infancy. It is not necessary to suppose that every scar on the face of Nature, deep entrenched and jagged, is an imperfection or a mark of wrath; for it may be a scene, where an angel passing by would stop and admire it as a symbol of God's power, a faint comma, as it were, in the revelation of his attributes; it may be a scene, which awakens great thoughts in an angel's bosom, as a hidden lowly daisy does the more gentle ones; the daisy being a flower, which an angel might stop to gaze at as an emblem of sweetness and humility.

And in this view, as a hieroglyphic of Power, this fathomless dread gorge is also a proof of Love. It was Love that appointed it as an emblem of Power. So is the great wide Sea, and that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to play therein. So are the

volcanoes, the ice-continents, and the burning deserts. All may be works of Love, though they show nothing but Power. And even if it be Power in exercise for the avenging and punishment of sin, even then it is Love; for every lesson of God's wrath is Love, and where there is sin, wrath is a proof of Love, of Love saving by wrath the lookers on from rushing into wrath.

There are places in our world, where we may suppose that beings from another planet, conversant with the history of ours, would stop and gaze solemnly, and speak to each other of God's retributive justice. Such is that black dead sea with arid shores, that rolls where Sodom stood. If angels went to take Lot from the city that was to be burned, how often, when angels pass the place, scarred now with retribution, do they think with shuddering of the evil of sin! Yet even that retribution was invested with the atmosphere of Love, and had not God been Love, he might have let Sodom stand, he might have let the guilty go unpunished. If God were not Love, then there might be no future retribution of misery to the wicked. But justice only does the work of Love, and Love works for the purity and blessedness of the universe. Where there is sin, Love without wrath would only be connivance with iniquity.

It is a fact therefore, that in your natural theology, sin being given, pain is absolutely necessary, in order to prove the benevolence of God. So that the problem and the answer might be stated thus: Given, the fact of sin, how will you demonstrate that God is a good being? Answer: Only by proving that God punishes sin. In this view, the misery with which earth is filled, so far from being a difficulty in God's government, goes to establish it as God's. A malevolent being would have let men sin without making them miserable; therefore, God could not be proved benevolent unless, in a world of sin, there were the ingredient of misery.

Then as to the other problem: Given, a race of sinful creatures: What sort of a world shall they be placed in? You would certainly answer, Not a world of unmingled softness and beauty, not a Paradise of enjoyment, not the early and undiseased Eden of innocence and love, but a world, in which there shall be enough of storm and tempest, enough of painful climate,

and of the curse of barrenness, and of the element of disaster and ruin, to show God's frown and evident curse for sin; but yet enough of the means of enjoyment, if rightly used, to draw men to industry, to show God's kindness and love, and enough of beauty and sublimity to impress, delight and educate the soul. It is just a world so mingled, a world scarred with evil, as well as bright with good, that we, a sinful race, do really inhabit.

The view which men take of the argument for the goodness of God from the works of creation will vary much according to their own states of mind. A man suffering the consequences of sin, or a man under a cloud of care, and destitute of faith, or a man burdened with present miseries, without any consolation from divine grace, would see things very differently from a calm mind, a quiet mind, a happy mind, a mind at peace with God. The Universe takes its coloring from the hue of our own souls ; and so, in a measure, does the solution of the question whether the Universe, so far as we are acquainted with it, proves a God of love. A heart that loves God, and rejoices in the happiness that fills the world around it, will say instinctively that it does, and will sympathize with God in his own feelings of delight in the happiness of creation. A misanthropic heart, a sinful heart, a rebellious heart, will perhaps be disposed to say No, or will overlook, and cannot understand and appreciate, the power of the argument. For a mind disposed to make difficulty, plenty of difficulty exists. For a mind humbly disposed to learn of God, there is confirmation of the soul's faith, even in difficulties themselves, which are as buttresses supporting the spire that sublimely points to heaven.

CHAPTER XLI.

Pass of the Splugen into Italy.-The Cardinell and Macdonald's army.— Campo Dolcino and Chiavenna.

FROM the little wild village of Splugen, overhanging the young Rhine-river, where there is an excellent mountain inn, having supped, slept, and breakfasted, 4711 feet above the sea, you take your departure at pleasure for either of the two Alpine passes into Italy, the Splugen or the Bernardin. Both of them carry you across scenes of the greatest wildness, winter, and sublimity, into almost perpetual loveliness and summer. You pass the snowy recesses, where Nature holds the nursling rivers to her bosom of glaciers, feeding her infants with ice; you go down into Elysian fields, where the brooks sparkle and dance, like laughing children amidst flowers and sunshine. The whirlwind of war has poured across each of these passes, in the most terrific of the seasons, driven by the French General Lecourbe at the Bernardin, and by Macdonald at the perilous gorge of the Cardinell. They marched in the midst of fierce tempests and falling avalanches, that swept whole phalanxes as into the depths of hell, as if the avenging genii of Switzerland were up in arms, the ministers of wrath against the oppressor. The pass of the Splugen, rising more than 2000 feet above the village of Splugen, and 6814 above the sea, brings you out at Chiavenna and the Lake of Como. That of the Bernardin, rising 7115 feet above the sea, and about 2400 above Splugen, opens upon Bellinzona and the Lakes of Maggiore and Lugano.

We take the Splugen road, and following it through four miles and three quarters of laborious ascent, come to the narrow mountain ridge, which traces the boundary line between Switzerland and Lombardy. The steepest ascent is effected by a great number of zigzags, so gradual, that they turn almost parallel on one another. The pedestrian will do well to scale across them, as

one might cut a coil of rope across the centre, instead of running round it; and climbing from crag to crag, he will speedily see his carriage and friends far below him, toiling slowly along, while he himself seems to be mounting into heaven. The laborers were at work upon the road above these zigzags, constructing a tunnel or gallery for safety from the avalanches, so as to let them shoot over the roof into the gulf below without harm to the passengers. But a man would not wish to be present either in the tunnel or on the zigzags, when an avalanche thunders down. One would suppose it would sweep gallery and all before it, tearing a trench in the mountain, like the furrow of a cannon ball across rough ground.

You reach the summit of the pass, the highest ridge, and as usual there is little or no intermediate space, no debateable level, but you descend as instantly, almost, as from one side of the steep roof of a house to the other. The fierce wind cutting your face, and sometimes blowing as if it would hurl you back bodily into the inn at Splugen, or the thundering Rhine, tells you at once, as well as the extreme cold, when you have reached the culminating point, for you get nothing of Italy here except an Austrian bayonet, sharp and watchful as the ice-breeze. Perhaps you may have been expecting to meet the warm breath of the South, and to look down from the peaks of winter into the verdure of sunny Italian landscapes. As yet the Italian side is as savage as the Swiss, and there is an element of gloom besides, almost sensible in the air itself, and visible as a symbol, in the awful desolation around you,-grim despotismi, vigilant, insolent, remorseless. So pass on, if you please, and enter some of its guard-houses, built as much like dread prisons as may be, and where you feel as if in prison yourself, while your passport and your baggage are under examination. How different this, from

the pleasant, hospitable reception on the Grand St. Bernard!

The old road from this point passed through the terrific gorge of the Cardinell, where Macdonald, at the will of Napoleon, undertook a five days' fight with the rage of the elements. It was winter and storm, but there was no retreating. He advanced with his army in the face of a cannonade of avalanches, on the brink of unfathomable abysses, where many a score of despairing men and