PARIS

seems a very different place now from the Paris we left full-blown, under the Exposition, a year ago. The gala costume it then wore is considerably sobered. The streets are not near as full, nor near as clean. It does not seem so brilliantly lighted, and many of its shows have disappeared. But I confess I like it better in its ordinary aspect; and my sense of its majestic proportions, its grand roominess, and its wonderful accommodation to the wants of a vast population, is not diminished. As to the wealth of its shops, there seems to be nothing that the East or the West, the Old World or the New produces, that can not be found here. I notice that what are considered the specialties of all other countries and towns, and which travelers visit them to procure in perfection or more cheaply, are all to be found in Paris in as much variety and excellency, and at the same or less rates than in their own homes. Nobody need go a step out of Paris to provide himself with every thing which most travelers scour Europe, Asia, and Africa to obtain, and have no end of trouble in bringing through custom-houses and over railroads at so much the pound.

I was struck yesterday with seeing one of the most immovable of all luxuries, a hot bath, moving on wheels-bathtub, and hot water in a vessel beneath, on a small truck moved by hand-carried and ready to be set up at a mo

French Protestant Church.

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ment's call in any body's lodgings. Can any thing exceed the portableness of Parisian civilization?

Sunday morning we went over to No. 3 Richard le Noir, near the opening of the Boulevard St. Antoine, to hear Athanase Coquerel, fils, preach. The father, for thirty years celebrated for the vigor and eloquence with which he preached Liberal Christianity in the established French Protestant Church, died in January last, at the age of 73-worn out with labors and vexations. This church has eight places of worship in Paris, all belonging to the municipality. It is supported about half by the city, a quarter by the National Government, and a quarter by the people. Its ministers receive annual salaries of about $2000, with lodgings. It dates back to the days of the Reformation, and has always had two theological tendencies in it, a Conservative and a Liberal one. It seems to have been hitherto the policy of the Government not to allow either of them to get the entire mastery of the other. The Orthodox tendency is in the ascendency, so far as the clergy are concerned; of the fourteen now con⚫nected with the Consistory in Paris, eleven being, it is said, Orthodox, and three Liberal. The oldest, M. Martin Paschoud, is a brave, enlightened Liberal, who has a good deal of the hero in him, and who is fully capable of maintaining his somewhat isolated position with dignity and ability. He is not a man of books or special scholarship, but a man of character and wisdom. He is afflicted with some difficulty of the spine, which often lays him up, and is about 65 years old. He presides by seniority in the Consistory, and yet this Consistory has deprived him now for four years, and M. Coquerel, fils, also, of the right of preaching in the churches under their control, on account of Liberal principles. The Government has not approved the exclusive policy of the Consistory; and although M. Martin Paschoud does not preach,

he is still recognized by Government as in office, catechizes and prepares the youth of his parish for communion, and performs all the other functions of his place, and draws his salary. Rev. William Monod is reported to have told him, while presiding this very week in the Consistory, that he, Paschoud, was neither a Christian, a pastor, nor a Protestant! Such is the virulence of the bigotry in the Orthodox overwhelming majority of ministers in the Paris Consistory, that no obstruction they can offer to the influence, the privileges, or the wishes of the heterodox Liberals of their number, is ever spared. M. Coquerel, pere, had for thirty years contended with this spirit of rancorous exclusion; but although he made a great impression on the people, he seems only to have intensified the animosity of the clergy. His son, whom he had called to his assistance, and who for twelve years had shared his labors, was deprived about four years since of the right to preach in the Consistorial churches. Every other candidate whom M. Coquerel, pere, presented to the Consistory, asking for his appointment as his assistant, the Consistory rejected; so that M. Coquerel's life is thought by his familyto have been shortened by the oppressive labors that were laid upon his weary shoulders, and by the sorrow which the persecuting spirit of his ministerial colleagues caused him. None of them compared with him in public influence, in pulpit eloquence, or in useful citizenship. It was Cuvier who called M. Coquerel to Paris. Born in Paris, he had commenced his ministry in Holland, and Cuvier, when a Cabinet minister, had invited him to return to France and take one of the pastorates of the French Protestant Church. He at once greatly distinguished himself, and never lost his great hold on the laity. There are about thirty thousand people belonging to this Church-the Reformed Protestant Churchin Paris.

There are also here, perhaps, twenty-five thousand

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Lutherans, chiefly Germans, and usually of the humbler class. The Reformed are of all classes-chiefly the middle-but with a few titled and rich families, as well as three hundred very poor families. The Church is said to be governed in the interests of the Orthodox party, chiefly by means of the poor, whose votes are bought at five francs apiece. There are three thousand voters in the Church; and as the two parties of the laity are about equally divided, it does not require a very large body to hold the balance. Now as the overwhelming majority of the clergy are Orthodox, and have in the Consistory the control of the funds and of the whole policy, they manage, it is freely said, to have the popular election go their own way. The Opposition claim that bribery and corruption are resorted to, and that illegal proceedings vitiate most, elections. The Government alone has power to correct these injuries to the rights of the Liberals. But the Government is too constantly in the use of the same methods of controlling and vitiating popular elections to dare to say any thing, and so the wrong goes on.

The people take every method—that is, a full half of them do-of manifesting their sympathies with the Liberals, and especially since the persecution which deprived M. Martin Paschoud and M. Coquerel, fils, of the right to preach in the churches. They send them their children to prepare for the communion; they call on them for marriages and baptisms; and as these ministers still have the privilege of going into the churches to administer these rites, they often seize the occasion to preach to the large companies who assemble to honor their service.

It may be asked why the Liberals do not secede and establish a church of their own? The answer they give is, that French Protestants are too much attached to their history; and feeling that the Liberal tendency was coeval with their

Church, they maintain a rightful claim to all the prestige of three centuries of existence; that to secede would be to acknowledge themselves new men; that the bulk of their adherents, who love their Liberal doctrine, would yet be shocked and discouraged by any ecclesiastical revolution; that the Protestants in France, and especially in Paris, are surrounded by such an overwhelming Catholic population, any division among them would end in the engulfing of them all. They propose to fight it out in the Reformed Protestant Church, and to wait until some general change in the relations of Church and State places all Protestants on a better basis.

Meanwhile there can be no doubt that, despite the bigotry of the clergy, and the aid and assistance afforded by English and American Orthodox sympathy and money, there is a decided increase of Liberal feeling among the laity. True, there are a dozen large and rich families, mostly Swiss in origin, who aid in sustaining by generous gifts the Orthodox party. They act in concert, and have great influence. But, in spite of this, it is noticed that the attendance on the Liberal preaching is largest; that the charities under the Liberals are most flourishing; that the collections taken up when they preach are fullest. M. Coquerel's successor, for instance, yesterday took up in the great church, where he preached to a few people, a collection for the starving Arabs in Algeria of a couple of hundred francs; young M. Coquerel in the hall, up four pairs of stairs, where a crowd of six hundred people had collected from all parts of the city to hear him, took up a collection of two thousand francs-just ten times as much-for the same purpose! The Liberals, silenced in the churches of the Consistory, although their case is not yet finally settled, since the Government halts, and avoids confirming the acts of the clergy, are now, without conceding any defeat, sustaining preaching in three public halls