XI. L’HOTEL DU MONT BLANC 451

they cannot unmake themselves. Baptism makes people children or subjects of God; Confirmation makes them soldiers of God, or soldiers of His Kingdom; and Orders make them magistrates of the Kingdom. If you have received baptism, you are therefore an “enfant de Dieu.”’ What being an ‘enfant de Dieu’ meant was not very clear; for the ineffaceability of baptism was illustrated by the instance of Julian the Apostate, who did all he could to efface it-‘Mais la mort,’ said the preacher, growing eloquent, ‘le poursuivit jusqu’à’-(he stopped, for he did not know exactly where to)-‘la tombe; et il est descendu aux enfers, portant cette marque, qui fera éternellement sa honte et sa confusion.’”

221. I wonder at the lightness of these entries, now; but I was too actively, happily, and selfishly busy, to be thoughtful, except only in scholarly way; but I got one of the sharpest warnings of my life only a day after leaving papa and mamma at St. Martin’s,-(cruel animal that I was!-to do geology in the Allée Blanche, and at Zermatt.) I got a chill by stopping, when I was hot, in the breeze of one of the ice streams, in ascending to the Col de Bon Homme; woke next morning in the châlet of Chapiu with acute sore throat; crossed the Col de la Seigne scarcely able to sit my mule, and was put to bed by Couttet in a little room under the tiles at Cour-mayeur, where he nursed me as he did at Padua;¹ gave me hot herb-tea, and got me on muleback again, and over the Col de Ferret, in a day or two; but there were some hours of those feverish nights which ought to have made my diaries more earnest afterwards. They go off, however, into mere geology and school divinity for a while, of which this bit, written the evening after crossing the Col de Ferret, is important as evidence of my

¹ [See above, § 144 (p. 375).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]