in commercial, manufacturing, or other ordinary vocations of life. They are not fenced in, as in the English church, by expensive forms of education dividing the clerical class from other men however well educated; nor by essential forms, as in the same ceremonial church of England, which none but the regularly ordained clergyman can legally, or in public opinion, perform in a religious sense; nor as in England, by the ignorance of the rest of society from whose want of education the clergyman, however poorly educated himself, derives a certain social influence. They have in Scotland neither more knowledge, nor of a higher kind, than the people they have to instruct. They have no status in public opinion simply from being ordained, and unfortunately are struggling for influence and power as a clerical body co-ordinate with the civil power in the state, without laying the foundation superiority of attainments and education - on which alone clerical power or social influence can rest in an educated country. The young men of the Swiss church stand higher, compared to the people, in education, than those of the Scotch. They are elected by the people from a leet sent from government. The leet is made up by the consistory from the roll of licensed candidates, according to their standing or seniority. The candidates are first suffragans or assistants to parish ministers. They are all paid by the state, and are, undoubtedly, in the present generation, well educated, pious men. A re-action has taken place in the Swiss as in the Scotch church, and in both, the young clergy, not the old, lead the movement. But in Switzerland the movement seems confined to a very small circle, chiefly of females, around the pastor. The men appear not to enter into that circle. The taint in the flock is too deeply seated in the constitution of the Swiss church, and in the social state of the people, to be cured by their clergy in one gener ation. The late insurrection in the canton of Zurich, in 1839, in which the peasantry, headed by some of the clergy, * overturned, not without bloodshed, the local government, for having appointed Dr. Strauss to the chair of theology, may appear altogether at variance with this low estimate of the Swiss religious character. I was in Switzerland at the time; and from all I could learn, I considered it political not religious, and confirming the opinion of the low religious state of the country. Dr. David Frederic Strauss published, in 1835, his life of Jesus-Das Leben Jesu avowedly with the object of overturning all belief in those events of or connected with our Saviour's history, which cannot be reconciled to, or explained by, the ordinary course of natural operation. He brings to this attack upon Christianity and the miracles not the wit, ingenuity, or philosophy of a Voltaire, a Hume, or a Gibbon, but a mass of learning and biblical criticism, which, his admirers say, the church is unable to match. The weight of profound scholarship and philosophical criticism is, it seems, all on the side of infidelity; and the most able and learned of the German theologiansno superficial scholars in biblical lore-have, it appears, been worsted in the opinion of the learned by this Goliath. In the wantoness of power the authorities of * Dr. Strauss's Leben Jesu was admitted into Prussia by the college of censorship, in consequence of a minute of Professor Neander, one of the censors, and one of the most eminent divines in Prussia, which stated, "that if the interpretation of the original history of Christianity laid down in Dr. Strauss's work were to be generally received, Christianity, as at present understood, would certainly be at an end. The work, however, is written with such philosophical earnestness and science, that a prohibition of it by the state would be unsuitable, because it can only be overcome in the fields of learning and philosophic science; and it is, moreover, a work which can scarcely penetrate beyond the circle of the learned." Such a character of Dr. Strauss's work, from a scholar and divine of such eminence in biblical literature, places it beyond the contempt of ordinary theologians, who may affect to sneer at what they cannot even read. Why do not our young clergy withdraw from their political economy, and their non-intrusion, or intrusion politics, and refute the errors in philosophical criticism and in biblical learning of this antagonist, who, at the age of five-andtwenty, or thirty, has thrown down the gauntlet to the divines of Europe? Zurich chose to call Dr. Strauss to the vacant theological chair in their university -to appoint a learned man who denies and controverts the very facts and foundations of all Christianity, to teach theology to those who are to instruct the people in the Christian faith. This attempt on the part of a government shows sufficiently the state of religion in the country. It was defeated, not from any new-born religious zeal of the people, but because the misgovernment and perversion of the powers entrusted by the community to their rulers, in this absurd appointment, were apparent; and the ministers found no want of followers, from the roused common sense of the people, even among those who perhaps had not crossed the church door for six months, to go to Zurich and displace magistrates who had abused their delegated powers so obviously. So little of religious zeal entered into this movement, that Dr. Strauss, as he had received the appointment, was allowed the retiring pension of a professor. The people appointed new members without changing the forms of their government, retired to their mountains and valleys, and this revival was at an end. The present commotions in Argau, also, appear to be entirely a struggle between Protestants and Catholics for property and political power. The snowy peak, the waterfall, the glacier, are but the wonders of Switzerland; her beauty is in her lakes -- the blue eyes of this Alpine land. The most beautiful passage of scenery in Switzerland is, to my mind, the upper end of the Lake of Geneva, from Vevay, or from Lauzanne to Villeneuf. Scenery more sublime may be found on the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, Brientz; but in the pure, unmixed sublime of natural scenery there is a gloom, essential perhaps to it, which cannot long be sustained without a weariness of mind. Here the gay expanse of water is enlivening; and the water here is in due proportion to the landward part of the scenery not too little, nor too much, for the mountains. The climate, too, under the shelter of the high land, the vegetations of various climes upon the hillside before the eye at once, have a charm for the mind. The margin of the lake is carved out, and built up into terrace above terrace of vineyards and Indian-corn plots; behind this narrow belt, grain crops, orchards, grass fields, and chestnut-trees have their zone; higher still upon the hill-side, pasture grass and forest-trees occupy the ground; above rises a dense mass of pine forest, broken by peaks of bare rock shooting up, weather-worn and white, through this dark green mantle; and last of all, the eternal snow piled high up against the deep blue sky and all this glory of nature, this varied majesty of mountain-land, within one eye-glance! It is not surprising that this water of Geneva has seen upon its banks the most powerful minds of each succeeding generation. Calvin, Knox, Voltaire, Gibbon, Rousseau, Madame de Staël, Lord Byron, John Kemble, have, with all their essential diversities and degrees of intellectual powers, been united here in one common feeling of the magnificence of the scenery around it. This land of alp and lake is indeed a mountain-temple reared for the human mind on the dull unvaried plains of Europe, to which men of every country resort, from an irresistible impulse to feel intensely, at least once in their lives, the majesty of nature. The purest of intellectual enjoyments that the material world can give is being alone in the midst of this scenery. CHAP. XIV. NOTES ON SWITZERLAND. MONTREUX. CHECKS ON OVERPOPULATION.- SWISS DAIRY. AGRICULTURE.- -SOCIAL CON DITION. It is of the people of the countries I visit, not of the scenery, of political and social economy, not of rocks and wilds, forests and floods, that I would speak, even in Switzerland. During two successive summers of late years, I fixed myself in the parish of Montreux on the side of the Lake of Geneva, not far from the castle of Chilon. The locality is celebrated in every note-book, delineated in every sketch-book of every sentimental tourist from the days of our grandmothers — for before Byron sung, and when Chilon was nothing more than it now is an old French-like château, very suitable for its present use a military magazine the locality was the region of sentimentality, and hot-house feeling; for here Rousseau had placed his Julie, and St. Preux; and Clarens, and Meillarie, and all that is real or unreal in the Héloise are here or hereabouts. But the locality has its own claims on the political economist as well as on the romantic tourist. We, the inhabitants of the parish of Montreux, are of unspeakable interest in the speculations of the enlightened prosers on political economy in the winter evening re-unions of Geneva and Lausanne. They demonstrate from our sage example, to a simpering circle of wives and daughters-in-law, the wisdom, duty, possibility, and utility of keeping the numbers of a community, be it a nation, parish, or family, in due Malthusian ratio to the means of living. We of this parish have the honour of being cited in print to all Europe - besides the cities of Geneva and Lausanne as an edifying example of sagesse on the great scale, as a perfect and remarkable instance of the |