A month in Switzerland

by F. Barham Zincke

At Ste. Marie aux Chênes, where we stopped an hour for luncheon, we spent part of the time in walking about the village, and looking at the traces of the fight. It is a large village, every house of which has thick rubble or stone walls. All the buildings in it were occupied strongly by the French; and all were, successively, carried. It was a from house-to-house and hand-to-hand fight. We found all the doors, window-shutters, and window-frames in the place, new, because the old ones had been battered in, hacked to pieces, and destroyed by the Germans, as they forced their way into each house separately. No prisoners were taken.

Among other spots we visited here was a little enclosed space, where the Germans had buried their dead. While we were looking at the grave of a young Englishman of the name of Annesly—Von Annesly he is called on the stone—who had fallen in the assault on the village—he had attained to the rank of lieutenant in the German service—an elderly peasant woman approached; and, on finding that we were not Germans, freely entered into conversation with us. She soon told us that she was the mother of the Curé of the village. She had been one among the few inhabitants of the place, who, having taken refuge in cellars, had remained in it during the assault. She was very communicative, and invited us to accompany her to her house, where she showed us, with touching pride, their best tea service, and the church ornaments, which are used on fête days. The best room in the house had been appropriated to their safe keeping, and exhibition. The china service had been a present, what we should call a testimonial, and was placed, en évidence, on a table in the middle of the room. The church ornaments were arranged on a large sofa. They consisted of artificial flowers moulded in porcelain, with a great deal of gilding. The good woman then took us into the study; M. le Curé’s study, as she was careful to tell us. She never referred to M. le Curé, and her thoughts were never far from him, without a smile of satisfied motherly emotion playing over her face. Those were M. le Curé’s books. There were about half-a-dozen. That was the table at which M. le Curé sometimes wrote. That garden, the outer door of the study opened upon it, was a beautiful garden, which M. le Curé worked in himself. M. le Curé was now absent from home, for the purpose of making a collection for the purchase of a figure of the Virgin, to commemorate her goodness in having miraculously saved the Church, when so much injury had been done to every other building in the place: but the church in the neighbouring village we saw had been burnt during the assault upon it. The good villagers had been very liberal in their contributions for the purchase of the figure. The sum, however, mentioned as their contributions, amounted only to a few francs. Still it might have been much for them to give, for they may not have been much in the habit of giving. M. le Curé’s study, the scene of his peaceful and sacred studies, had been made a hospital. There, just where he always sits, a limb had been amputated. Here, and there, on the floor wounded men had died. The floor of M. le Curé’s study had been stained with blood. One memento of that fearful day had been preserved. It was a small hole in the door through which a bullet had passed: but that was a bullet that had hurt nobody. I shall never think of the field of Gravelotte without a pleasing recollection of the mother of the Curé of Ste. Marie aux Chênes. She was a tall woman with what seemed a hard face, but at every mention of M. le Curé, or of the Holy Virgin, it was lighted up, and softened. She wore a faded cotton dress, and a weather-stained, coalscuttle-shaped straw bonnet—her grandmother, perhaps, had once been proud of it—but the reflection of her simple, motherly, happy heart on her face, refined both face and dress. The heart’s ease only was noticed.

The Germans have done, and are doing, everything that could be done, to restore to the people what they lost during the war. They have, in these parts, repaired every house and building that admitted of repair; and completely rebuilt all that had been too much injured for repair. They have thus given many new lamps for very old ones. They have not yet rebuilt the Church of St. Privat, because the people themselves have not yet decided, whether they wish the new one to be the facsimile of the old one, or a larger structure, such as the increased population of the modern village requires: the familiar opposition between those who are afraid to acknowledge that the world has made any advances, and those who see nothing objectionable in advances, or in accommodating themselves to them. Of the other injuries, the people in these parts had sustained by the war, they were asked to make an estimate themselves. Half of their estimates was immediately paid to them; and they were told that the remaining half would be paid, after the 1st of October, on their having decided to become German citizens. The inhabitants of the villages round Metz had had their corn, and cattle, and horses swept off by the French Commissariat. These poor people the Germans fed during the siege with provisions brought from Germany. I could not hear in Metz, or in the neighbourhood, of a single instance of a German soldier having been seen drunk, or that any act of violence could be charged against them; nor could I hear even of oppression or harshness of any kind.

Metz, with its central arsenal, and its outer circle of apparently impregnable hill fortresses, gives you the idea of a place which nature had formed expressly for this gunpowder era, intending that its owners should fortify it, and use it as a rallying place for defeated armies—the armies, not of a small, but of a great nation; where they might in safety collect their shattered fragments; and, having re-organised and re-equipped themselves, might again take the field for fresh efforts. In the days of bows and spears it could not have had this value, which it may lose when our present instruments of war shall have been superseded by discoveries not yet dreamt of; but, although the French were not able to turn the place to such an account, still this seems to be one of the uses that may be made of it by its possessors: besides being an impregnable advanced post for the invasion of a neighbour.

The Cathedral is far too short for its height. It contains some windows of very good old stained glass. The only person I saw in it was an American. Shall I say that we had both come to see it, just as we might go to see some curious object in a museum? I, at all events, accused myself of something of this kind, for I had a consciousness of the discord between such a purpose, and the history and character of the structure. For however much it may now have the appearance of a thing unused, and unloved, and from which the soul has fled, yet was it built to satisfy a want, in the religious order, which all men longed to satisfy; and to give visible expression to a feeling, which then stirred every heart. Not anything else, not money, not power, could have built it; that is to say, could have summoned into existence the sentiments, of which the building is an embodiment.

But on this occasion its clustered columns, its groined roof, its lofty aisles, its jewelled light, transported my thoughts only to Mr. Spurgeon’s Tabernacle; for I found myself endeavouring to understand and measure the difference between the two: but the endeavour brought me to see, under so much outward diversity, only an inward identity. They are both equally the result of the desire to form elevated and right conceptions of God—the focal name in which all elevated and right conceptions meet; and so to open the heart and mind, as that these elevated and right conceptions, which have been projected from them, may react upon them. This is Religion, the Spiritual life, in their simplest expression, in their inner form. In the ages of Faith, as they have been called, the most effectual way of attaining the desired end was through the eye; that is to say, the means, that could then be used with most effect, was art, in architecture, sculpture, painting, music. In the then state of the heart and of the imagination these best stirred and attuned them. Hence the Cathedral, and all that is implied in it. In these days, not of the knowledge, or of the conditions of life, or of the faith, of the old kinds, the most effectual means, especially among the lower strata of the middle class, is not art, which would have no power over them, but such direct appeals to their understandings and consciences, as will not be beyond their capacities. Hence Mr. Spurgeon and his Tabernacle. But the object is in both one and the same.

No sooner, however, had I come to this, which seemed for a moment to be a conclusion, than my thoughts entered the reverse process, and the identity I had been contemplating was transformed into diversity. The juxtaposition, in the mind’s eye, of the Cathedral and of the Tabernacle suggested a difference, if not in the elements of religion itself, yet, at all events, in the modes through which different religious systems have attempted to act on the world. The Cathedral seemed to represent two modes: that which may for convenience be called, using the word in a good sense, the heathen mode; that is to say, culture, but in the form only of art; and the priestly, or Judaical, mode, which means organization. Its grand and beautiful structure grew out of the former, through the aid of the latter. The Tabernacle represents a totally different mode—the prophetical; and prophesying is the principle of life, of growth, and of development in religion. We see this throughout the history both of the Old and of the New Dispensation. Romanism has killed this vital principle; and is, therefore, as good as, or worse than, dead; for it has a bad odour. It is now all dead heathenism, and dead organization: a gilt and gaily painted monstrous iron machine, which can be set at work, but which has no heart. This explains everything. This is the key that unlocks its whole modern history. Its long ghastly list of persecutions, its Inquisition, its St. Bartholemew’s, its Infallible Monocracy, are all alike logically deducible from the determination to live by other means than that of prophesying; in fact, utterly to suppress the one means of life, and to live, if such a thing were possible, by those means only which have not life in themselves. But Persecutions, Inquisitions, St. Bartholemew’s, and Infallibility can be of no avail: for prophesying has always and everywhere been, and will always and everywhere be, the life of religion; and, therefore, destructive, sooner or later, of all cast-iron systems. With respect to the Tabernacle, it is not so much that it has rejected the other two modes, as that it has no comprehension of their nature and use. It never, therefore, has either risen to the level of ordinary culture, or organized itself as a religious system. It makes no appeal to the former, and, Wesleyanism excepted, no use of the latter. This explains why, though not devoid of life, it is without form, and without attractive power for refined minds. Christianity, it is evident, in its early days depended entirely on prophesying. As it grew, having at that time the living power of assimilating what it needed, it borrowed organization from Judaism, and culture and art from heathenism: but prophesying must always be the distinctively Christian mode; so long as Christianity addresses itself to what is in man, that is, to his knowledge and moral consciousness.

Which, therefore, of these modes is the best is an inquiry, which would be somewhat sterile, and misleading; for each is good in its proper place, and degree, and for its proper purpose; and under some circumstances one, and under other circumstances another, will inevitably be resorted to. It would be more profitable to keep in mind that not one is ever exempt in its use from error and perversion. These, at every turn and step, will reappear, as the unavoidable results of the imperfections of those, in whose hands the administration of religion, as of all human affairs, must rest: for they are but men; and, Error and Perversion, you both have the same name, and that name is Man. History, and experience, teach us that, in the long run, the most efficient check to these errors and perversions, both in those who minister, and in those who are ministered to, is, as far as is possible in this world of necessarily mixed motives, and defective knowledge, to be dead unto self, and alive unto God, that is to the good work one finds set before one. Herein is the true apostolism: not for self, but for the end for which one was sent—for an object, beyond self, distinctly seen, and distinctly good. This in an individual is almost, and in a body of men perhaps quite, impossible. Still it is just what always has to be done by ‘the Church,’ which, in whatever sense we take the word, will be a body of men; and by Mr. Spurgeon, acting with those who believe in him; and, therefore, whenever attempted, will only be done very imperfectly. So it must be. But we see that, notwithstanding, the world has advanced, and is advancing. In ‘the Church,’ and among the Spurgeons and their respective people, and among others, who cannot be quite correctly ranged under either of these categories, there will always be some (generally a very small minority; but these are not questions that can be decided by counting hands) who have caught partial glimpses of what ought to be said and done, and who will set themselves the task, generally a very thankless one, of making their partial glimpses known. One thing, however, at all events is certain: it is safer to trust to the Spirit of the Prophet than to the culture and organization of the Priest, if they must be had separately: though, perhaps, their due combination, might be best of all.

These were the thoughts which passed through my mind, while I was in the Cathedral of Metz; for the American, who came in just after I had entered it, required but a very few minutes for ‘doing’ this grand old monument of mediæval piety; and soon left it to the twilight—the day was nearly run out—and to my twilight meditations.

The Hotel de l’Europe, the best in Metz, is not good. The head-waiter—he was an Austrian—was so imperious that I soon found it advisable, whenever I had occasion to ask him a question, to apologise for the trouble I was giving him. The angular peg had been put into the round hole. Nature had intended him for a German prince. They charge here for a two-horse carriage to Gravelotte, including the driver, two Napoleons. At this rate they must get back, one would think, every week the original cost of the rickety vehicle and half-starved horses. There is, however, but little competition in the matter of the imperious waiter, and none at all in that of the costly carriage he provides for you.