sense of fear and mystery about them! One does not know what is
going on there, what they are waiting for; they have no human
meaning. They do not seem to have any relation to humanity at all.
Sunday after Sunday one used to have sermons in that hot, trim
little wooden church--some from quite famous preachers--about the
need of rest, the advantage of letting the mind and eye dwell in
awe upon the wonderful works of God. Of course the mountains are
wonderful enough; but they make me feel that humanity plays a very
trifling part in the mind and purpose of God. I do not think that
if I were a preacher of the Gospel, and had a speculative turn, I
should care to take a holiday among the mountains. I should be
beset by a dreary wonder whether the welfare of humanity was a
thing very dear to God at all. I should feel very strongly what the
Psalmist said, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" It would
take the wind out of my sails, when I came to preach about
Redemption, because I should be tempted to believe that, after all,
human beings were only in the world on sufferance, and that the
aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical to life, was in even more
urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among the heights, I grew to
feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of
splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at all. It certainly
is not there with any reference to man--at least it is hard to
believe that it is all there that human beings may take a
refreshing holiday in the midst of it. When one penetrates
Switzerland by the green pine-clad valleys, passing through and
beneath those delicious upland villages, each clustering round a
church with a glittering cupola, the wooden houses with their brown
fronts, their big eaves, perched up aloft at such pleasant angles,
one thinks of Switzerland as an inhabited land of valleys, with
screens and backgrounds of peaks and snowfields; but when one goes