6. That the present buildings should be disposed of, and the institution located in a more healthful, convenient, and congenial site. 7. That in remodelling the College upon the plan proposed, the new arrangements should be so made as to admit of further expansion, if subsequent circumstances should call for it.

In selecting the College at Stepney as the one concerning which he wishes this recommendation to be made, the writer desires to add, that he is influenced by no other considerations than such as relate to supposed greater facilities for effectuating the suggested change there, than at either of the other three.

And, in conclusion, this suggestion, in relation to the College at Stepney, he desires to be understood as proposing only, from the fear that the denomination, or rather the gentlemen present, are not prepared to take measures of a larger and more radical kind. Such measures, nevertheless, he thinks the case requires, and indulges the hope that they will be eventually resolved upon.

AVALANCHES OF THE JUNGFRAU.

BY REV. GEORGE B. CHEEVER.

WHEN We come to the inn upon the Wengern Alp, we are near 5,500 feet above the level of the sea. We are directly in face of the JUNGFRAU, upon whose masses of perpetual snow we have been gazing with so much interest. They seem close to us, so great is the deception in the clear air, but a deep, vast ravine (I know not but a league across from where we are) separates the Wengern Alp from the Jungfrau, which rises in an abrupt sheer precipice, of many thousand feet, somewhat broken into terraces, down which the avalanches, from the higher beds of untrodden everlasting snow, plunge thundering into the uninhabitable abyss. Perhaps there is not another mountain so high in all Switzerland, which you can look at so near and so full in the face. Out of this ravine the Jungfrau rises eleven thousand feet, down which vast height the avalanches sometimes sweep with their incalculable masses of ice from the very topmost summit.

The idea of a mass of ice so gigantic that it might overwhelm whole hamlets, or sweep away a forest in its course, being shot down, with only one or two interruptions, a distance of eleven thousand feet, is astounding. But it is those very interruptions that go to produce the overpowering sublimity of the scene. Were there no concussion intervening between the loosening of the mountain ridge of ice and snow, and its fall into the valley, if it shot sheer off into the air, and came down in one solid mass unbroken, it would be as if a mountain had fallen at

noon-day out of heaven. And this would certainly be sublime in the highest degree, but it would not have the awful slowness and deep prolonged roar of the Jungfrau avalanche in mid air, nor the repetition of sublimity with each interval of thousands of feet, in which it strikes and thunders.

I think that, without any exception, it was the grandest sight I ever beheld, not even the cataract of Niagara having impressed me with such thrilling sublimity. Ordinarily, in a sunny day at noon, the avalanches are falling on the Jungfrau about every ten minutes, with the roar of thunder, but they are more seldom visible, and sometimes the traveller crosses the Wengern Alp without witnessing them at all. But we were so very highly favoured as to see two of the grandest avalanches possible in the course of about an hour, between twelve o'clock and two. One cannot command any language to convey an adequate idea of their magnificence.

You are standing far below, gazing up to where the great disc of the glittering Alp cuts the heavens, and drinking in the influence of the silent scene around. Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of, perhaps, two thousand feet, is broken into millions of fragments. As you first see the flash of distant artillery by night, then hear the roar, so here you may see the white flashing mass majestically bowing, then hear the astounding din. A cloud of dusty, misty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. The eye follows it delighted, as it ploughs through the path which preceding avalanches have worn, till it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare rock, perhaps more than two thousand feet perpendicular. Then pours the whole cataract over the gulf, with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable. Nevertheless, you may think of the tramp of an army of elephants, of the roar of multitudinous cavalry marching to battle, of the whirlwind tread of ten thousand bisons sweeping across the prairie, of the tempest surf of ocean beating and shaking the continent, of the sound of torrent floods or of a numerous host, or of the voice of the Trumpet on Sinai, exceeding loud, and waxing louder and. louder, so that all the people in the camp trembled, or of the rolling orbs of that fierce chariot described by Milton

"Under whose burning wheels

The steadfast empyrean shook throughout."

It is with such a mighty shaking tramp that the avalanche down thunders.

Another fall of still greater depth ensues, over a second similar castellated ridge or reef in the face of the mountain, with an awful, majestic slowness, and a tremendous crash in its concussion, awakening again the reverberating peals of thunder. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till, at length, it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice, like the slide down the Pilatus, of which Playfair has given so

powerfully graphic a description. Here its progress is slower, and last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments, as they drop, out of sight, with a dead weight into the bottom of the gulf, to rest there for ever.

Now figure to yourself a cataract like that of Niagara (for I should judge the volume of one of these avalanches to be probably every way superior in bulk to the whole of the Horse-shoe fall,) poured in foaming grandeur, not merely over one great precipice of 200 feet, but over the successive ridgy precipices of two or three thousand, in the face of a mountain eleven thousand feet high, and tumbling, crashing, thundering down, with a continuous din of far greater sublimity than the sound of the grandest cataract. Placed on the slope of the Wengern Alp, right opposite the whole visible side of the Jungfrau, we have enjoyed two of these mighty spectacles, at about half an hour's interval between them. The first was the most sublime, the second the most beautiful. The roar of the falling mass begins to be heard the moment it is loosened from the mountain; it pours on with the sound of a vast body of rushing water; then comes the first great concussion,-a booming crash of thunders, breaking on the still air of mid heaven; your breath is suspended as you listen and look; the mighty glittering mass shoots headlong over the main precipice, and the fall is so great, that it produces to the eye that impression of dread majestic slowness of which I have spoken, though it is doubtless more rapid than Niagara. But if you should see the cataract of Niagara itself coming down five thousand feet above you in the air, there would be the same impression. The image remains in the mind, and can never fade from it; it is as if you had seen an alabaster cataract from heaven.

The sound is far more sublime than that of Niagara, because of the preceding stillness in those awful Alpine solitudes. In the midst of such silence and solemnity, from out the bosom of those glorious glittering forms of nature, comes that rushing, crashing thunder-burst of sound! If it were not that your soul, through the eye, is as filled and fixed with the sublimity of the vision, as through the sense of hearing with that of the audible report, methinks you would wish to bury your face in your hands, and fall prostrate, as at the voice of the Eternal! But it is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the combined impression made by these rushing masses and rolling thunders upon the soul. When you see the smaller avalanches, they are of the very extreme of beauty, like jets of white powder, or heavy white mist or smoke, poured from crag to crag, like as if the Staubach itself were shot from the top of the Jungfrau. Travellers do more frequently see only these smaller cataracts, in which the beautiful predominates over the sublime; and at the inn they told us it was very rare to witness so mighty an avalanche as that of which we had enjoyed the spectacle. Lord Byron must have seen something like it, when he and Hobhouse were on the mountain together. His powerful descriptions in Manfred could have been drawn from nothing but the reality.

JOHANNES TAULER.*

It is natural to any mind of reflective habit to take pleasure in looking back into long past ages, and to realise how the soul's life, under such far different environment from ours, was developed; in what utterances the earnest spirit then delivered itself; through what outward form of circumstances and customs, as through an instrument which the age had prepared, the music of the poet flowed. Now and then a spirit of power rises from the dead, and summons us to follow it with a loving and seeing heart, and we find ourselves suddenly in the midst of the old centuries; we see life as it was then, and listen to

"The still, sad music of humanity,"

giving itself forth in the very tones which filled the ears of our forefathers. Such a vision of the past, for instance, has the Niebelungen Lied given us: courtly and camp life, with the human heart beating under all. And such another vision, though in a far different plane of man's spiritual existence, has come to us in the reprint of the sermons of Dr. Johann Tauler. In them we see how the highest phase of our complex nature, that which emphatically is "the life of God in the soul," was nurtured and developed in those distant ages, which, for the mass of mankind, were but too truly dark.

Of this work, Luther, in whom so eminently spiritual principles turned to aliment for the working powers, speaks in terms of admiration and even gratitude. In a letter to his friend Spalatin, after renewing entreaties which he had formerly made to him, to procure a copy of Tauler's Sermons, he assures him that he would therein find a pure and holy teaching, in comparison with which all others would be soulless and earthly, whether in the Greek, Latin, or Hebrew tongue. In a former letter to the same friend, from which an extract is given in D'Aubigné, vol. i., p. 242, 8vo ed., he writes, "If you find pleasure in reading old, pure theology in the German language, procure the Sermons of Johannes Tauler, for I never saw, either in Latin or in our own language, a theology more wholesome, or more conformable to the gospel. Taste them, and you will see how gracious the Lord is; but not till you have first tasted and experienced how bitter is everything in ourselves." The present edition has been compiled by a careful comparison of Spener's edition of 1720, with the earlier ones. It is brought out in three volumes. The first, which alone we have at present seen, consists of a memoir of the latter years of Tauler's life, occupying 58 pages, which was given in the oldest editions, and sermons for the Sundays and festivals, from Advent to Easter-eve inclusive.

The principal subject of the discourses is, " Jesus Christ, the Crucified." The soul of Tauler's religion was that daily living with Christ, as the unseen but consciously present friend, of which we have re

JOHANN TAULER'S PREDIGTEN AUF ALLE SONN- UND FESTTAGE IM JAHR. ERSTER THEIL. VON ADVENT BIS OSTERN. Berlin, 1841.

cently observed so eminent an instance in the late Dr. Arnold. The work takes a little of that form which, more or less, all true religion in the Roman Church, in those ages, assumed,-that of mysticism. A deep humility pervades the whole, and traces of mental conflict, in its varied forms, are found in every discourse. The life prefixed adds much to the value of the work, as it shows with what spiritual foes the warrior had sharply to contend, while watching beside his armour, ere he girt it upon him, and went forth to his post. If there be solemn moments in a man's life, they are those on the eve of his entrance on his work, when all that he himself can perform of accomplishment and training is done, and he watches alone and prays; God and his own soul, the only existences in the universe to him; the future all dark; no bidding to take his sword yet heard; no post as yet appointed him; as if life lay still, and the next moment might extinguish it. Truly has it been said, "Ere man can do anything that shall endure, he must have come to feel himself nothing." To this point Tauler came late in life.

About the year 1340, in a town, the name of which is not given, Dr. Tauler occupied the first pulpit in the place. Well versed in the Scriptures, clothing the scholastic theology of his day with what charms he could, and enforcing all he brought forward with earnest and mild eloquence, he attracted many hearers, and his fame was far extended. Among the strangers drawn by his reputation, was a layman whom Tauler well regarded as sent by God, between whom and himself the closest intimacy arose. This man, whose name does not transpire, but who was, we afterwards find, the biographer of his friend, and the channel to which the world was also indebted for this collection of sermons, appears to have been of high Christian character. He soon perceived that there were depths of self-knowledge to which his friend had not reached; and we know not which to admire most, his earnest perseverance in bringing him to the same conviction, or Tauler's humility in listening to and endeavouring to comprehend reproofs and admonitions, of which as yet he saw not the truth.

The suspicion that his friend was in possession of some higher principle than himself, gradually rose to conviction, and self-reflection confirmed the charge, that he had hitherto sought himself only in his works of service to God. He perceived that Christianity had been, with him, something exterior, something apart from himself,-a thing whose beauty he appreciated, and eloquently set forth; not that all-pervading influence in which he had his being." The life" he had lived "in the flesh," he had not lived" by faith on the Son of God." But how to alter his life, and at the age of fifty to learn that most difficult of all attainments, entire self-renunciation. Sustained by the thought, that the labourer who came at the eleventh hour received a penny, as well as he whose day commenced with the first, he resolved, with the help of God, to enter on the task; and, in the spirit of a child, he besought his friend to instruct him how he might attain this better life. The good man advised him to discontinue preaching for the present, till he could see clearly whither he would lead his fellowmen; to offer no advice in the confessional; to restrict himself to slight diet, that the mind might be unimpeded to perform his daily