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the fatal sleep, the snow drifted over them, fold by fold, silent and swift, and the place that knew them once knew them no more for ever: the wind passed over it, and it was gone. They found the hapless pair in the following spring, when the snows had melted away; and they bore them tenderly and sadly to this last resting-place. No one came to claim them. Where the poor woman came from, what was her name, no one ever knew; and in this heart-touching pathos of mystery and death, she awaits the coming of that other and brighter spring that shall melt even the chill of the tomb.

It is indeed a strange place that morgue! All its ghastly tenants perished in the same dreadful way,-the victims of the storm-fiend. Side by side they repose, so cold, so lonely, so forsaken; with no earth to cover them; no token of love from those who were nearest and dearest; no flower to bloom over their dust; not even one green blade of grass to draw down the sunshine and the dew of heaven to their dark charnel-house. Traveller after traveller from the ends of the earth comes and looks in with shuddering dread through the grating on the pitiable sight, and then goes away, perhaps a sadder and a wiser man. For our own part we could not resist the tender impulse, which moved us to gather a small nosegay of gentians and blue-bells, and throw it in, as an offering of pity to the poor, deserted, and forgotten dead. It is impossible to dig a grave in this spot, for the hard rock comes everywhere to the surface, and but the thinnest sprinkling of mould rests upon it, hardly sufficient to maintain the scanty vegetation. This sterile region refuses even a grave to those who die there! So cold and dry is the air, that the corpses in the morgue do not decompose in the same way that they do at lower elevations. They wither and collapse into mummies, embalmed by the air, like the dried bodies preserved in the catacombs of Palermo,-and for years they undergo no change, at last falling to pieces, and strewing the ground with their fragments. Within the last twelve years, no less than sixteen persons have perished in the snow. Some five or six years ago, two of the monks went out with a couple of servants to search for a man who was supposed to have lost himself in the mountains. They were scarcely fifty paces away from the Hospice, when an immense avalanche fell from the side of Mont Chenaletta, and buried the whole party under eighteen feet of snow. The dreadful catastrophe was seen from the convent door, but the monks were utterly powerless to render help. When rescued, the party were all dead.

The number of accidents on the St Bernard

pass has greatly diminished of late years; and now the services of the monks in winter are principally required to nurse poor travellers exhausted by the difficulties of the ascent, or who have been frost-bitten. Returning from our morning walk, we saw the famous marons, or St Bernard dogs, playing about the convent door. There were five of them, massively built creatures, of a brown colour,-very like Newfoundland dogs, only larger and more powerful. The stock is supposed to have come originally from the Pyrenees. The services they have rendered in rescuing travellers are incalculable. A whole book might easily be filled with interesting adventures of which they were the heroes. In the Museum at Berne, we saw the stuffed body of the well-known dog, " Barry," which is said to have saved the lives of no less than forty persons. The huge creatures were fond of being caressed; and one of them ran after our companion, as he was going up the hill-side by a wrong path, and pulled him back by the coat-tail!

After a substantial breakfast, we paid a visit to the chapel to deposit our alms in the alms-box, for though the monks make no charge for their hospitality, or even give the least hint of a donation, there is a box placed in the chapel for the benefit of the poor, and to this fund every traveller should contribute, at the very least, what the same accommodation would have cost him at an hotel. It is to be feared, however, that the great majority contribute nothing at all. Not one of the company who supped and breakfasted with us approached the chapel, having skulked away as soon as they could decently take leave; and yet they were bedizened with gold chains and jewellery of a costly description. There was one Scotchman present who carried out his sound protestant principles at the expense of the poor monks. He was a very thin, wiry man, but he ate an enormous supper and breakfast. He drank a bottle of wine at each meal, and helped himself most largely to everything on the table. He took what would have sufficed for four ordinary men, and, to our intense disgust, he rubbed down his stomach complacently in the morning ere departing, and said, in the hearing of all, that "he had made up his mind to put nothing in the alms-box, lest he should countenance popery!" The expenses of the establishment are very heavy, while the funds to meet them have been decreasing. Formerly the convent was the richest in Europe, possessing no less than eighty benefices. But Charles Emanuel III. of Sardinia, falling into a dispute with the Cantons of Switzerland about the nomination of a provost, sequestrated the possessions of the monks, leaving

The Hospice Chapel.

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them only a small estate in the Valais and in the Canton de Vaud. The French and Italian governments give an annual subsidy of a thousand pounds, while another thousand is raised by the gifts of travellers, and by collections made in Switzerland,-Protestants contributing as freely as Roman Catholics. Notwithstanding their comparative poverty, however, the monks are still as lavish and hospitable as ever, up to their utmost means. We ourselves were witnesses to a scene of profuse hospitality, which reminded ust of the descriptions given of the bounty of abbeys in the middle ages. As it was the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, crowds of beggars and tramps from the neighbouring valleys, masses of human degradation and deformity of the most disgusting character,-were congregated about the kitchen door, clamorous for alms, while the monks were busy serving them with bread, cold meat, and wine. What they could not eat they carried away in baskets which they had brought for the purpose. Entering the chapel with our little offering, we were greatly struck with its magnificence, as contrasted with the excessive plainness of the outside, and the sterility of the spot. It is considered a very sacred place, for it contains the relics of no less than three famous saints, viz., St Bernard, St Hyrenæus, and St Maurice, of the celebrated Theban legion of Christians. Five massive gilt altars stood in various parts of the chapel, while the walls were adorned with frescoes and several fine paintings and statues. The marble tomb of Desaix, representing him in relief, wounded and sinking from his horse into the arms of his aid, Le Brun, was a conspicuous object. "I will give you the Alps for your monument," said Napoleon, with tears in his eyes, to his dying friend; "you shall rest on their loftiest inhabited point." The body of the general was carefully embalmed at Milan, and afterwards conveyed to the chapel, where it now reposes. A crowd of peasants, men and women, were kneeling, during our visit, in the body of the church, performing their devotions; while three or four monks, dressed in splendid habiliments of crimson and gold, were chanting the solemn melodies of a Gregorian mass, accompanied by the rich tones of a magnificent organ, and clouds of fragrant incense rose slowly to the roof.

Anxious to see the geographical bearings of the convent, we climbed up, with immense expenditure of breath and perspiration, a lofty precipitous peak close at hand. We had a most glorious view from the top, for the atmosphere was perfectly clear, and the remotest distances plainly visible. In front was 'le Mont Blanc," as the inhabitants proudly call it, and at this

distance of fifteen miles in a straight line, it looked infinitely higher and grander than when seen from the nearer and more commonly visited points of view at Chamouni. Far up, miles seemingly, in the deep blue sky, rose the dazzling whiteness of its summit, completely dwarfing all the other peaks around it. On our left was the enormously vast group of Monte Rosa, its everlasting snows tinged with the most delicate crimson hues of the rising sun; while between them the stupendous obelisk of the Matterhorn, by far the sharpest and sublimest of the peaks of Europe, stormed the sky, with a long grey cloud flying at its summit like a flag of defiance. Around these three giant mountains, crowded a bewildering host of other summits, most of them above 13,000 feet high, with enormous glaciers streaming down their sides, and forming the sources of nearly all the great rivers of the continent. Our eye and soul turned away from this awful white realm of death, with relief, to the brown and green mountains of Italy, which just peered timidly, as it were, above that fearful horizon in the far south, with an indescribably soft, warm sky brooding over them, as if in sympathy. That little strip of mellow sky and naturally-coloured earth, was the only bond in all the wide view that united us to the cosy, lowly world of our fellow-creatures. Hurriedly descending, with many a picturesque tumble and glissade, which did not improve the continuity of our clothing, we reached the foot of the hill in safety. Shortly afterwards we bade adieu to our hospitable entertainers with mingled feelings of gratification and regret; gratification, because we had seen so much that was new and interesting to us, and had been so kindly treated, though strangers in a strange land; and regret, because the palmiest days of the Hospice are over, for the railway tunnel through Mont Cenis, which will soon be completed, will whirl away travellers direct into Italy, and few will care to turn aside, on a long and somewhat difficult journey, to visit the spot.

It is commonly said that we may learn some of the most useful lessons from our enemies. And certainly there is one lesson which, above all others, we may learn from a visit to the Hospice of St Bernard, and that is the lesson of beneficence, of doing good to all as we have opportunity. Whatever his creed, whatever his prejudices against the Roman Catholic religion, and against priests and monks in general, we do not believe that a single traveller ever quitted the hospitable roof of this fraternity without feelings of the highest respect for them. We yield to none in our detestation of the false faith which invented the tortures of the inquisition and lighted the martyrfires of Smithfield, and whose blighting effects, on soul, and mind, and body, we have seen so frequently illustrated at home and abroad. We yield to none in our desire to see the

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dominion of pope and priest for ever abolished, and the pure and glorious doctrines of the gospel preached everywhere instead of the soul-ruining dogmas of the Church of Rome. But still we cannot repress the admiration we feel for men like the monks of St Bernard, who, doubtless, with mistaken notions of self-salvation by works, but yet with pure and unselfish motives, carry out unweariedly the great precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, and thus put many of us Protestants to shame, whose Christianity consists more in preaching and speaking than in practice. These young men, amid the monotony of a life crushed and deprived of all colour and fragrance, amid the fearful cold and privations of a polar climate, amid toils and dangers which would appal the heart of the stoutest of us, quietly and humbly, without any Pharisaical outcry, do, year after year, the work of the good Samaritan, without respect of persons or creeds, until at last a horrible death strikes them down one by one. Oh! is there one charitable soul who doubts that the righteous Judge on the great day of reckoning, will say to some at least of these noble monks, as he will say to all who have given a cup of cold water to a disciple in the name of a disciple, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!"

H. M.

ART. V.-Young's Life and Light of Men.

The Life and Light of Men. An Essay. By JOHN YOUNG, LL.D. (Edin.) Alexander Strahan, Publisher, London and New York.

A

1866.

LTHOUGH this work is a determined and thorough-going attack upon what are usually regarded as Evangelical principles, it is deserving, on several accounts, of careful and respectful treatment from evangelical reviewers; and as far as in us lies, it shall receive such treatment from us. The proved ability and religious earnestness of Dr Young, the service he has rendered to the cause of Christianity by his singularly striking and beautiful treatment of an important branch of the Evidences that has not yet been so much cultivated as it ought, and the influence which these. powers and services are fitted to give to any views he puts. forth, forbid this work to be handled without respect. The impression produced by his "Christ of History" is too fresh on our minds, and too thoroughly in his favour, to permit us to approach any work of his without being at the outset