Editorial August 20, 1910 Issue

"WHENCE COMETH MY STRENGTH."

John B. Willis

He who has not climbed the Gorner Grat has yet to experience a great event. Its approach, first of all, will yield a continuous pleasure, especially if at Visp one has the courage and wisdom to decide to "tramp it" up the valley, and thus comes to know for himself something of the Swiss lowlands, which are packed with the picturesque, even as are the highlands with the sublime. The quaint, heavy-roofed hamlets and villages, the scant but wondrously green hill-side farms and gardens, and yet more unique and interesting, the kindly peasant-folk beside the way,—all these crowd the day with delights; while ever and anon there opens up a vision of snowy skyland, glorious enough to awaken a thought of nearness to the threshold of the infinite.

At Zermatt, which nestles beneath the beetling grandeurs of the Matterhorn, one enters upon the precipitous path that leads to the summit of an outlook than which the world supplies nothing more inspiring. Here, in the midst of the mighty peaks that seem to have gathered themselves familiarly about him, one realizes as never before, perchance, the significance of elevation and a pure atmosphere to breadth and definiteness of vision; more than this, in the measure that his heart is hospitable to spiritual suggestion, there will come to him a new and quickening sense of the native exaltation and supremacy of the good and beautiful, without and within, a realization of the nobility of man, the true selfhood, and his relation to God, which can never be forgotten. Here the events of the earthly round, its aims and achievements, its joys and sorrows, are seen to be the merest trivialities, and gladly turning away from them all, one is impelled to say with the psalmist, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills;" be it mine, evermore, to live upon an exalted plane of ascending thought!

We profit by the highest ministry, surely, of so-called nature when it declares for us "the glory of God," when it promotes in us that mental ascension which is the very substance of prayer. The thought of the ancient bard, that the hills of God, the heights of spiritual intuition, yield perennial strength, is but recast by the later singer who said, "Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a believing soul. It is the Spirit of God pronouncing His works good."

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