ugly, dingy church, carrying green boughs. The children stood whilst the pastor, habited in a black cloak, catechized and heard their renewal of the baptismal vows. It pretended to nothing more, no communication of grace to strengthen.
My father always on Sunday mornings read Morning Prayer with the Psalms and proper lessons, and a short sermon out of a book. We never, with the exception of the Sunday of the Confirmation, attended a Protestant service whilst at Thun.
We made our way to Vevey for the winter, and took a house with a terrace commanding a noble view of the lake and the mountains beyond. There were few English in the place, at all events such English as we cared to know. But there was an Irish chaplain, and service was held in a large room in one of the hotels. The English chaplains abroad at that time, and for long after, were usually men who for very good reasons could not, or did not care to, reside in their native land.
An old friend at a much later period of my life, a lawyer, said to me, "As far as my experience goes, the great difference that exists between the High Church and the Low Church parsons is, that the former get into pecuniary, and the latter into amatory scrapes."
These chaplains lived on what they could pick up on the Sundays by letting the seats, or as, at Lucerne, by charging every one admitted into the chapel the equivalent of a shilling, and having a collection as well. Often enough their money ran short, and they had to send their sons round with a begging letter to collect sufficient to relieve them of immediate embarrassments. They stood very low in the opinion of the natives, and even the Evangelical pastors were shy of associating with them.
At the time there were three parties in the religious world of Switzerland: (1) The old Formalists, clinging to the expositions of belief by the Helvetic Reformers, cold, uninspired by any breath of spiritual fervour, presenting a frozen surface; its liturgical forms without life, its predication uninspiring; tolerated as an institution, but provoking no enthusiasm. (2) The new, progressive party of inquiry, applying tests to every doctrine and every book of Scripture, and engaged in transforming Christianity into Socinianism or to mere Deism. Calvin had burnt Servetus in the market-place of Geneva for his independent views, and
