frames were hung round the walls. On the left, high up, was an antique organ-loft of curious workmanship. The discoloured ceiling was of elaborate design, with frescoes of which little more than the outlines remained. Near the central door there was an old baptismal font of worn alabaster. A lame female sacristan in peasant dress was arranging the flowers on the altar. I asked her the hours of Mass. "At half-past five, half-past six, and half-past seven in the morning," she replied. Five little children were moving softly round the church doing the Stations of the Cross, before each of which they knelt in turn and prayed with their arms outstretched. After the revolt of Switzerland to Protestantism in 1532 Chablais became the battlefield of fierce conflicts. Three times between that and the end of the century it had been invested and held by the Swiss Calvinists, when they were finally driven out in 1593. But an occupancy of over thirty years had enabled them to establish the new "Reformed" religion as the faith of the people, and when a year later, in response to the desire of Charles Emmanuel the Duke of Savoy, St. Francis came with one companion to restore Catholicism in Chablais it is said that he found only seven Catholics in the capital of the Province. His family and his friends had done their utmost to disuade him from the difficulties and dangers of an undertaking that seemed hopeless. And, humanly speaking, it was certainly a strange chance that led this gentle priest, who was a model for all time of meekness, patience, and the widest and tenderest Christian charity, to become a protagonist in the religious strife of an intolerant age. The duties of such a mission would seem scarcely favourable to the practice of those maxims which he had ever on his lips. "Truth must be always charitable; for bitter zeal does harm instead of good." "A judicious silence is ever better than an uncharitable truth." And yet it was by the power of this spirit of sweetness and forbearance far more than by the force of dialectics that he made the truth to prevail. In the whole Province, containing more than 25,000 inhabitants, there was not one priest and scarcely a hundred Catholics left. But in the face of all dangers and discouragements he preached day by day to audiences of five or six, returning at night for protection to the distant castle of Allinges where the governor was a Catholic. The story of his success seems almost incredible if we are to assume that the Savoyards had any convictions remaining when he appeared among them; but in three years, we are told, he had made more than seven hundred converts, and in one more Chablais was Catholic again with less than a hundred Calvinists left among the people. When we recognise the fact that what is described generally as religious persecution in earlier ages had more frequently a prudential than a spiritual motive-that religious dissent was justly regarded as a menace to the political existence of states whose interests were bound up with those of the Church in the closest alliance, we may be less disposed to unsparing condemnation of the intolerance of their rulers. And it must be considered a tribute to the enlightenment of the Duke of Savoy that in such an age he sought to restore the unity of faith in his recovered possessions by no harsher methods than the mild evangelizing of St. Francis de Sales, and that he permitted the few remaining Calvinists who refused to conform, to sell their property before being expelled from the Duchy. The Annals of Savoy are full of warfare with its varying fortunes till they end in 1860, when the Duchy was ceded to France. But though it may yet have its share of religious persecution to come at the hands of the political brigands who, under the name of rulers, are now disturbing the peace of their country, it is still almost exclusively a Catholic land. Walk out into the beautiful country, rich with corn and vines, and you meet with witnesses in the rustic crosses and little shrines you come upon at every mile or so. The level highways stretch through a landscape in which the charm of variety is never wanting. The surroundings are perfect for a peaceful summer holiday-with one drawback. The Juggernaut of progress pursues you even here. You are walking alone, enjoying the solitude, the song of the birds, and the fragrance of the fields, when the blare of a raucous horn bursts on the stillness. A rumble from behind swells into a roar, and a panting, snorting motor whirls past you in a rush of wind, poisoning the air with the fumes of petrol; and for long minutes you stand with rage at your heart, blinking and choking in a vortex of dust. But up in the hills among the pine trees you are free from this annoyance; and many of these alluring heights are within an easy distance of the town. Les Allinges, three miles south of Thonon, was in the tenth century the most important of the Burghs of Chablais; now it is a little village. When you get there, halfan-hour takes you up through the trees to the top of its historic hill with its ruined castle, convent, and chapel of St. Francis de Sales. Eastward and westward of the hotel you can ramble by the edge of the lake. And the lake-who can describe the beauty of its changing aspects? Blue as the Mediterranean under a pallid sky green as the English Channel overspread with leaden clouds. On calm, clear evenings, as the sun goes down in a crimson blaze, shades of pink and orange are thrown on the water from behind the mountains on the far shore, deepening into bronze and purple as the light fades. But an hour may transform it. The wind of a sudden storm rushes through the trees, and the surface is lashed into a sheet of white spume. Deafening peals of thunder re-echo in a constant roar and the lightning plays in terrific flashes through the sky. Concise, another pretty village, lies close to Thonon by the water's edge in the direction of Evian. On my way there I turned in under a shady gateway that stood a short distance off the road, and found myself in a little graveyard. With one side shadowed by trees and another protected by the remains of an old wall, its rustic surroundings gave it an air of homeliness and peace that fitted its consecrated purpose. But it was a French graveyard, and everything had been done to mar the simplicity of nature with the affected conventions of grief. No mossy patches marked the hallowed plots. Garish immortelles, chaplets, crosses, and wreaths of wire and tin were crowded together in a profusion that hid the graves and the grass, and left only room to walk between them on the narrow paths. The artificial trappings and foppery of death seemed to deride what was simple and touching in the inscriptions. Beyond Concise, on the land which projects here sharply into the lake, I came by surprise on a beautiful park with the ruins of another ancient castle, and I was wondering what it was and what it had been when a stone inscription told me. It was the Domain of Ripaille-with a history that recalls the events of a century earlier than the age of St. Francis, and as full of deep interest for us, if less edifying. It was the home of the last of the Anti-Popes. The rulers of the great house of Savoy traced their genealogy from the tenth century; and a long line of glorious ancestors had successively extended and exalted his heritage when Amadeus VIII came to the throne in 1383. His territories stretched from Geneva to the Mediterranean, and from the Saone in France to the Sesia in Italy. But though he was zealous, like his predecessors, in increasing and consolidating his dominions, he had for a long time cherished the wish of retiring to a monastery when in 1434 he laid down his crown and put on the habit of the Knights of St. Maurice, a military order which he had founded at the Priory of Ripaille. Five years later the continuing distractions of the Council of Basle ended in open schism; the contumacious prelates affected to depose the Pope, and bestowed the tiara on Amadeus of Savoy. When his elevation to the Pontificate was announced to the royal recluse, he showed at first or pretended great reluctance, though the nature of his objections seemed hardly worthy of the gravity of the decision required of him. He disliked the form of the oath, the change of his name, and the loss of his hermit's beard! His scruples, however, were overcome, and he accepted the proffered dignity with the title of Felix V. But he gained little earthly profit by his spiritual treason, and, having played his miserable part for five years more, he abdicated in 1445. When we reflect on the horrors and scandals of an epoch like this-a fierce religious war, a priesthood who, in large numbers, were unfaithful to their vows, a rebellious council, and a pretender to the claims of St. Peter's successor, and remember that all these were evidences of the power of evil within the fold in an age when Christendom was undisturbed by any established revolt against the dogmas of the Church, we feel a sense almost of wonder that any belief could have survived the shock to moral principles and the perplexity to the faith of millions that such apostasies must have caused, even with a recollection in men's minds of the divine monition that "it must needs be that scandals come." But, great as must have been the distress of the faithful in those days, God had not left them without His witnesses. In the midst of this prevalence of error, corruption, and sin, when the lives of men belied the faith they heldfor the truths of Christianity were believed and not merely professed by the wicked as by the just- individual types of saintly piety and unshaken devotion to the laws of conscience and religion stand out, and receive the homage of their own time no less than ours, in proof, if it were needed, that with this outward denial of His laws Christ still reigned in the hearts of men. To us, with the accumulated testimony of centuries to the indefeasibility of God's promise to His Church, these spiritual afflictions of earlier ages should be a lesson rather than a trial of faith. One to teach us that in His inscrutable designs God has chosen earthen vessels for the repositories of His grace: that only through a defect of faith can the divine element of the Church suffer dishonour or obscurity from its association with the human frailty of its members: that the truth of eternal principles rests on a higher basis of proof than the fidelity of those who profess them. A great scholar of our age in writing of the historical aspect of the Church, with a range of view that embraces the annals of all times and of all nations, impresses this truth on us. "A system," says the late Lord Acton, "answering all the spiritual cravings, all the intellectual capabilities of man, demands more than a mere mental effort, a submission of the intellect, an act of faith, a temporary suspension of the critical faculty For the Church is to be seen, not in books, but in life. No divine can put together the whole body of her doctrine; no canonist the whole fabric of her law; no historian the infinite vicissitudes of her career. The Protestant who wishes to be informed on all these things can be advised to rely on no one manual, on no encyclopædia of her deeds and of her ideals; if he seeks to know what these have been, he must be told to look around. And to one who surveys her teaching and her fortunes through all ages and all lands, ignorant or careless of that which is essential, changeless, and immortal in her it will not be easy to discern through so much outward change a regular development, amid such variety of forms the unchanging substance, in so many modifications fidelity to constant laws; or to recognize in a career so chequered with failure, disaster, and suffering, with the apostasy of heroes, the weakness of rulers, and the errors of doctors, the unfailing hand of a heavenly Guide." CHARLES T. WATERS. A LISPER'S TRIUMPH POPE lithped in numberth, for the numberth came; J. H. |