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out of which there is no awakening, from which the eternal God is. not able to deliver a people? For the sake of France, for the sake of England, let us not cherish that horrible anticipation. Let us rather accept the tremendous discipline which He has appointed for onesome likeness of which may, for aught we know, be awaiting the other as a sign that his purpose is to restore and regenerate. No punishment of itself can work that end; but if He who sends the fire is ready to send his Spirit with it, He may bring, not a few individual souls, but societies and kingdoms, out of the prison-house. They must assuredly stay in it till they have paid the uttermost farthing; till they have given up all their pride, self-glorification, falsehood. But the old language of the prophet is applicable to them, “I will turn my hand upon thee, and purge away all thy dross, and will take away all thy tin. And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; afterwards thou shalt be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city." All such passages may be interpreted figuratively, so that city shall not mean city, or nation nation; so that righteousness shall be anything but just and honest dealing; so that the faithful shall be those who expect to be saved in their unrighteousness, not to be saved out of it. But the prophet may have meant just what he said; if he did, he will have spoken words of warning and encouragement to the people in the times of Ahaz and Hezekiah, and to the people in the times of Victoria and Louis Napoleon. And if he bade the former believe in the Name of the God whom they and their priests had forgotten, he may remind the latter that there is a Name with which all the nations of Christendom are sealed; about which, if their priests had believed in it, they would have disputed far less; in which the poorest may trust when their great men go into captivity, when they are famishing with hunger, and fainting from loss of blood. There may come a day when we shall know that the everlasting fires which are burning about us have not been in vain; when we shall own that they have saved the nations from everlasting death, instead of producing it.

F. D. MAURICE.

P.S.-What I said in the beginning of this article in reference to compromises and explanations which destroy the meaning of the Creed, and make the continued use of it in public worship most undesirable, has received an unexpected confirmation from the report of Her Majesty's Ritual Commission. The explanation of the Creed which that Commission has suggested is denounced by some of the ablest divines who belong to it, by some of those who most represent the feelings of the laity. How offensive-how intensely painful

-it must be to those who do not wish to mitigate the warnings of the Creed-who wish that they should bear with all their weight on us the priests who read it, and not on some heretics whom we may suspect of "wilfully" denying certain opinions of ours, I need not say. Agreeing most heartily in the objections of the eminent dissentients from the Report, I should yet be very dishonest if I endeavoured to claim any one of them as a supporter of the position which I have maintained in this paper. I fear that it will appear equally untenable to Mr. Buxton, to Dean Stanley, to Dr. Jeremie, and Dr. Payne Smith. Nevertheless, the more earnestly all their arguments are considered—the more weight is given to the feelings of those who wish to retain the Creed and of those who abhor it-the stronger is my hope that the Church will discover the stability of the old catholic ground, the feebleness of the uncatholic philosophy of bribes and threats which has been appended to it, and which, in our days, has been almost substituted for it. The two cannot subsist together. Almost any shaking of ancient formularies may be welcomed, if it leads to their final separation.

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"PARIS," says Montaigne, "a mon cœur dèz mon enfance, et

m'en est advenu comme des choses excellentes. Plus j'ay vu depuis d'autres belles villes, plus la beauté de celle cy peult et gaigne sur mon affection. Je l'ayme tendrement jusques à ses verrues et à ses tâches. Je ne suis François que par cette grande cité, grande en peuples, grande en félicité de son assiette, mais surtout grande et incomparable en variété et diversité de commodités, la gloire de la France, et l'un des plus nobles ornements du monde. Dieu en chasse loing nos divisions."

One would have hardly expected the sober Montaigne to have felt the witchery of Paris to this affectionate extent more than three centuries ago. Yet the city has ever possessed a strange fascination for its guests and indwellers, and that since the days of the Emperor Julian. This is no moment, however, for discussing from an æsthetic point of view the attractions and beauties of the capital, which are indisputable she is now en toilette de guerre, ready to launch and to receive the thunderbolt of war, and subject to perils and privations which come but rarely in their lives on any cities, and which some, like our own capital, have never known, and perhaps will never know. It seems more suitable to the crisis to endeavour to see what figure she makes in history at the different periods at which a calamity like that she has now to endure has fallen upon her. A review of the past sieges of Paris will moreover place us in contact with some

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of the most salient points of the history of France, at moments when her fortunes were being cast anew into the crucible of destiny.

Leaving aside the attack on the Celtic island Lutetia by Labienus, the lieutenant of Cæsar, and the assaults of Frankish, Burgundian, and other Teutonic invaders, the first siege of Paris which we have to notice was as historically significant as any; since it was owing to the energy and valour displayed therein by Eudes Capet, Comte de Paris and Duke of France, that the Capetian race became distinguished above all the other noble families of France-the prowess displayed by Eudes in defending Paris against the fierce onslaughts of the Normans for four successive years prepared the way for the establishment of the dynasty, which was destined to give to France such kings as Louis le Gros, Philippe Auguste, Saint Louis, Philippe le Bel, Louis XI., and Henry IV., the real founders of French unity. The unification of France and its formation into a separate nationality commenced at the siege of Paris by the Northmen. The nation then first clearly became conscious of its call to a separate national existence. The unwieldy empire of the Carlovingian dynasty, of which France was a mere dependent member, was already in decay and going to pieces. The last Carlovingian Emperor, Charles le Gros, was engaged too much in Italian politics, and his attention too much distracted by the demands upon it of the other constituent parts of his empire, to take sufficient care for this portion of his dominions which were year by year overrun and ravaged by the Northmen, and the necessity of a national and local dynasty for the protection of its interests became daily more evident.

Years had passed by since Charlemagne, with prophetic misgiving, beheld the first Danish fleet, and had a strange suspicion that the sons and grandsons of these sea-pirates would take terrible revenge on the nations of the West and South for the interminable warfare which he had carried on against the worshippers of Odin. Since then the fearless and ferocious Danish Jarls had carried terror with their dragon prows and their black sails into every part of the Carlovingian empire where rivers were navigable to their keels. They had mounted the Rhine and the Moselle up to Cologne and Trèves. They had devastated Nantes and ascended the Loire, and the districts of the Garonne and the Rhine also knew them too well. The Seine had for years before their last great siege been a common highway for the Danish rovers. The monks of the great abbey Jamieges had habitually been in the habit of hoarding up a store of treasure from their revenues to buy off the merciless ravages with Dancgelt, as they passed under their towers; and Rouen had been sacked again and again by the fierce Vikings. Many were the tales told of the deeds of daring and ferocity done on Frankish ground by such men as Jarl Osker, Regner Lodbrok, Biorn Ironsides, his

son, and Hastings, amid the fierce laughter of the wild seamen over the mead, when the wild light of the blazing logs turned to a ruddier hue the weather-beaten faces of the listeners, as they sat at their long tables in winter in the fir-built halls of Denmark and Norway. On one such occasion Regner Lodbrok boasted before Red Eric, the Ober-king, of his having mounted the Seine and put Paris to ransom; and upon Eric's expressing some doubts as to the truth of his story, he sent two of his men out of the hall to bring in before the drinkers the iron bar of the gate of Paris, and a carved larchen rafter of St. Germain-des-Prés, which he had carried off on his last visit. Indeed, under the effete Carlovingian rule the defences of the island city had fallen into ruin, and Paris was no more than an open city, from which the priests, soldiers, and inhabitants fled at news of the approach of the invaders. In the faubourgs, indeed, the strong, castellated monasteries were more capable of resisting attack than the city itself. On the north side was the monastery of St. Germain-l'Auxerrois, and the yet stronger monastery of St. Denis, from which, however, the monks fled on more than one occasion, carrying off with them to Rheims the body of St. Denis. On the south side there was the once powerful monastery of St. Germaindes-Prés, where Clovis and Clotilde lay buried, whose effigies were on each side the portal of the church. There were also the no less celebrated convents of St. Victor and St. Geneviève. The Faubourg St. Germain, at that time, was the most remarkable part of the environs of Paris, containing not only these great monasteries, visible from afar, but the great hall of the Roman Palais des Thermes, then still standing, and the vasta ruina, as it was called later, of the Roman amphitheatre, also rising to a lofty height. During the past year the substructures of this vast edifice, which had been forgotten for centuries, were brought to light by excavations, and the discovery of skeletons under the soil in good preservation, evidently of bodies buried in haste, made it presumable that these were the victims of some one of the many Danish inroads up the Seine. The merciless Northmen, with cold-blooded calculation, slew men, women, and children on their way, in order to paralyze resistance with the terror they struck into the populations. They strung up the bodies of labourers on the trees by the side of the Seine in batches of six, seven, and a dozen at a time, and slew so many of the inhabitants that the Seine rolled down shoals of corpses, and the islands of the river were white with the bones of the natives who had fallen beneath their battle-axes, and were swept along by the current of the river till they were caught on the shores of the many eyots which rise from the bosom of the Seine. It was Charles the Bald, who himself had not ventured to attack the Danes from his strong position at St. Denis, during the capture of Paris in 861, and was even fain to

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