530 PARIS AND THE GOSPEL. BY PROFESSOR W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D., LL.D. FIRST PAPER. ARIS is a word which one can hardly | Invalides, the figure of Liberty on the July pronounce without lingering over it. Column, and the minarets of the Russian To look on Paris in fine weather is to become church, demand the sunshine to kindle their conscious of an exhilarating influence, a buoy- golden flashes; but the great edifices with their elaborate sculptures; the parks and gardens, contrived to give effect to light and shadow; the long avenues of stately buildings, lessening in the remote distance, yet clear and bright as if they were close at hand; the broad river, dimpled all over with silvery smiles-all show how Paris depends on the sunshine. Seen in such weather, the city photographs itself on the mind. It is the idea of Paris which becomes fixed in the memory, albeit we may not have been without experience of leaden skies and watery streets. But we seldom think of these when we think of Paris. In our imagination it is always bright. Even by night it is an illuminated city. The street lamps and the shop windows, the festoons of red and green on the cafés in the Champs-Elysées, the flaming gas decorations of the theatres and music halls, show that when Paris cannot have the sunlight, it seizes eagerly the brightest substitute. The electric light at the Arc de Triomphe and other places excites the thought how magnificent it would be if all the city were lighted after that fashion, and tempts us to predict that ere long this will be achieved, and night will be turned to day. The Invalides. Looking more closely, we observe with what care everything has been constructed and arranged to please the eye. Eye-sores must be the abomination of the authorities, for they are seldom or never to be seen. All is ancy of the animal spirits, an unusually harmony, proportion, grace; and the eye is pleased and tranquil state, at least of bodily perpetually regaled with some new beauty. sensation. Of course, most places look best Statues half hid in leafy groves, fountains in sunny weather, though there are some, not tossing strings of diamonds in graceful curves far from home, so gloomy of aspect that dull to the sun, columns rearing their slender weather seems to suit them better than bright. shafts to giddy heights, palaces with a more But Paris is certainly not one of these. On than royal richness of decoration, churches no place does gloomy weather sit so incon- by their solemn piles making the gaiety gruously. No city seems to depend more around them look brighter by contrast, preon sunshine to bring out its characteristic sent themselves in endless succession. Trafeatures. Not merely the great dome of the versing the great thoroughfares, we wonder where the poverty and filth of the great city are to be found. If anything wearies the eye, it is the perpetual succession of these elaborately regular avenues and boulevards that are so fast displacing the older and less formal streets. Sometimes one is glad to get away to such a quarter as that of the University, to look for any faint traces yet lingering of the days of Robert Sorbon. If we survey the interiors of the public buildings, the Louvre, the Luxembourg, or (as it happened last year) the Great Exhibition, we get new evidence how thoroughly Paris understands the art of pleasing the eye; and not the eye only, but the other senses too. Everything is studied, and studied successfully. It is at Paris, of all places in the world, that those who can afford the cost will most readily find all that can give them outward pleasure. Certainly if such pleasure were equivalent to happiness, Paris would be Paradise, and the heart would find nothing more to desire. The Russian Church. But one soon feels that it is but a very small part of one's nature that is ministered to by all this attention to the lust of the eye and the other bodily senses. We seem to be treated as mere creatures of sense, and the deeper part of our nature gets little or no recognition. Everything in the outward aspect of Paris seems to say, Enjoy yourself; enjoy yourself as freely and readily as possible, and without regard to future consequences. Delight your eye with beauty of form and colour; and if your notions of propriety are somewhat shocked by undraped statues and pictures, or if you are made more familiar than you think becoming in a Christian country with Venus and Apollo, with Andromeda, or Daphne, or even Phryne, put all that down to prejudice, and consider that before such wonderful beauty the questions you have hinted at are not for a moment to be entertained. You pass along the ChampsElysées on a Sunday afternoon: you hear in a dozen places the crack of Punch's stick against poor Judy's bones; you see the merry-go-rounds in full swing; you behold an unbroken stream of carriages and cabs in full chase for the Bois de Boulogne; and you know that in the evening a hundred theatres and public exhibitions of amusement will be lisplaying their utmost attractions, while cafés without number will be entertaining their hosts of visitors, and the song and the jest and the shout of merriment will resound on every side. This does not look as if Paris took much trouble, on the day that commemorates our Lord's resurrection, to carry out the line of thought and feeling suitable to so glorious an event. Nor does the literature commonly displayed in bookshops and journal-marts, nor the art sketches in the print-shops and photograph establishments, do much to remind you of your deeper nature. At the numberless kiosks, nothing more solid than the penny or halfpenny journals seems to go off; and though there are bookshops and books of the highest class, they are confined to a very few localities, and the rest of the city seems abandoned to what is frivolous and sensational. We certainly do not think of Paris with unkindly feelings, and yet, even on an outside view of it, the thought will lay hold of us, how little of God is here! It seems as if it were more difficult in Paris than elsewhere to remember God, to think of life in its more solemn aspects, to realise to one's self the immortality of every human being one sees, even to feel tenderly for the people as those who doubtless have their share of In the Bois de Boulogne. life's troubles and sorrows, and whose surfacegaiety, as in so many similar instances, only disguises the hunger of unsatisfied hearts. How slight the impulse towards higher things | which the genius loci gives! We have sometimes caught ourselves moralising on the india-rubber balloons, with string attached, which purchasers at the Louvre bear away from that great emporium, and carry home a few feet above their heads. Or we have taken for our symbol the great captive balloon at the Tuileries, in whose car you may soar upwards above all the roar of the city exactly the length of the rope. Any upward impulse is limited indeed; for the mass of people a yard or two, and for the upper ten a few hundred yards at farthest, above the surface of the earth! This is Paris. Who would seek to go higher? Who would soar to heaven? Who would regulate his life by regard to the future and the eternal? If we may judge from the outward look of things, it is not in Paris that such persons abound. And if we penetrate below the surface, and go to the hidden or the half-hidden depths, our surmise is sure enough to be confirmed. Yet we must not fall into the very common mistake of regarding the Parisians as mere butterflies, mere creatures of gaiety and pleasure. Undoubtedly this element comes much to the surface, and gives to the town its most characteristic feature. But there is a vast deal of hard work done in Paris; it is a beehive, with thousands upon thousands of plodding, industrious, laborious people. There are very many of them, no doubt, who have learned to work when they work, and to play when they play. The moments of play are allowed freely to swallow up the fruit of the hours of toil. But we believe that there is also in Paris, among many of the working class, great frugality, a habit of living upon little, and a steady application of the energies to improve their means. The aim may not be a much more noble one than that of those who live to amuse themselves. It may be not a whit less of the earth, earthy. But it shows a capacity for self-control and steady-going habits, which, by God's grace, may yet be turned to good account. Only let a higher aim be supplied, these habits of plodding application will become invaluable. In Paris the hours of labour, especially in shops, are often much longer than they are among us. We do not call this an advantage, but the reverse; but it shows the capacity of the people. There are directions in which they are capable of keeping their energies on the stretch for a long time together, and if such a people should come under the power of the Spirit of God, who can tell the valuable service they might render to His cause? We have spoken of Paris as it presents itself at this day to the eye. But Paris is pre-eminently a historical city, with a history stretching over a period of well-nigh two thousand years. It carries us back to the days of Julius Cæsar, when the Parisii, one of the many tribes of Gaul, inhabited the city, or perhaps we should say the village, of Lutetia, on the little island of La Cité, where NotreDame and the Palais de Justice now stand. The change from Lutetia on La Cité to Paris stretching for miles upon miles around is even greater than the change from the Rome of Romulus to the Rome of Humbert I. And what a vast number of remarkable events, civil and religious, and what a still larger number of remarkable men, have been connected with the place during the intervening time. It is interesting to place ourselves on one of the commanding heights and look at Notre-Dame. in military conflicts and struggles not a few, where, according to tradition, St. Denis and his brethren, the first to preach Christianity at Paris, suffered martyrdom in the third century. The name, Mons Martyrum (Mountain of the Martyrs), perpetuates the tradition. Now, in the name of the religion which was then persecuted, they are building on it a magnificent church to the "Sacred Heart" a superstitious idea which seems to show that the authors of the project are about as ignorant of true Christianity as the men of the third century who killed its early missionaries. Yonder is Notre-Dame, where so many a Te Deum has been chanted, often for very doubtful mercies; where, in the golden days of the French pulpit, Bourdaloue and other great preachers held multitudes entranced, and spoke to the king and court of their conquests and their glories, their greatness and their fame, everything except their sins and abounding iniquities; where, in more recent times, Lacordaire, Hyacinthe, and others have held their conferences, and made such brilliant impressions, but effected so little change. That other height is Belleville, head-quarters of the Communists in recent days, where tragedies were enacted and retaliations inflicted that make your flesh creep; at the side of that church sixty priests were shot one morning, avenged, with others, when order was restored, by the death and banishment of tens of thousands of Communist ouvriers, whereby the quarter became so desolate and miserable as to attract to it the good Miss De Broen and the good Mr. McAll, on whose labours of faith and love so great a blessing has come. Who can look on the Place de la Bastille without recalling the dreadful prison where so many a life-often an innocent life—was dragged out in misery? Or the Palais-Royal and its neighbourhood, without. remembering the dreadful orgies of Robespierre and his comrades? With the Louvre and the Tuileries we associate the greatest kings and emperors, and very often their glories and their humiliations go together. Here the three dynasties of Bourbon, Orleans, and Bonaparte have left memories alike of their elevation and their fall. The common simile is applicable to more than one of them-they went up like a rocket, and came down like its stick. Great and beautiful though Paris is, its very grandeur is a kind of mocking commentary on the careers of the men who created it. Often their humiliation preceded their death. And even when they died in peace and at home, how little did they leave behind to exalt their name in any true sense! They furnish no exception to the doings of that levelling power which Sir Walter Raleigh so well apostrophised, "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world has flattered, thou 534 alone hast cast down and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet !” There are not many bright memories of the gospel in Paris, but there are some. The progress of the glad news in the days of the Reformation was alike interesting and remarkable. The Reformed cause had many warm adherents among the highest classes, but from the ruling powers it seldom received anything but bitter opposition. It was not a political movement, but somehow it was held to be hostile to the authority of kings. It gave that remarkable evidence, which was given in so many other places and countries, of the presence of a Divine power moving the heart with an irresistible influence. There was a catching power in the gospel; it spread like fire, laying hold of this one and the other as they came within its reach, and impressing them so powerfully, that the efforts of Church and State were alike unable to shake their convictions. In the history of the Reformation in many countries nothing was more striking than this catching power, not unlike what has been witnessed in the better class of revival movements. An old historian of the French Reformation says, speaking of the time (1569) when the first Synod of the Reformed Church was held, "The holy word of God is duly, truly, and powerfully preached in churches and fields, in ships and houses, in vaults and cellars, in all places where the gospel ministers can have admission and conveniency, and with singular success. Multitudes are convinced and converted, established and edified. Christ rideth out upon the white horse of the ministry, with the sword and bow of the gospel preached, conquering and to conquer. His enemies fall under him, and submit themselves unto Him. Oh the unparalleled success of the plain and zealous sermons of the first Reformers ! Multitudes flock in like doves into the windows of God's ark. As innumerable drops of dew fall from the womb of the morning, so hath the Lord Christ the dew of His youth. The Popish churches are drained, the Protestant temples are filled. The priests complain that their altars are neglected; their masses are now indeed solitary. Dagon cannot stand before God's ark. Children and persons The same writer gives an interesting description of the popularity of the psalmsinging which Calvin, with the aid of the once fashionable poet Marot and others, had introduced in the Reformed Churches. It is to be noted that singing in worship by the "This people had been unknown before. ordinance charmed the ears, hearts, and affections of court and city, town and country. The psalms were sung in the Louvre, as well as in the Prés des Clerks, by the ladies, princes, yea, by Henry II. himself. one ordinance alone contributed mightily to the downfall of Popery and the propagation of the gospel. It took so much with the genius of the nation, that all ranks and degrees of men practised it, in the temples and in their families. No gentleman professing the Reformed religion would sit down at his table without praising God by singing. Yea, it was an especial part of their morning and The Church of St. Germain. This evening worship in their several houses, to sing God's praises." In fact, the movement was too prosperous to be endured by the powers of Church and |