Article May 8, 1943 Issue

Hills Eternal

BASIL TODD-JONES

Those who live within sight of the mountains often come to look upon them as reassuring symbols of eternity amid the changes of human life. The sunshine of a clear day may light up their green depths, evening may throw their peaks into purple relief against the sky, or driving rain may blot them out for a time, but, however their appearance may alter, the do not change appreciably from year to year. In bad weather no one ever doubts that, invisible behind the rain clouds, they stand where they have always stood. The tide of battle has rolled through their passes, but the mountains remain.

So, in times of war especially, men look for reassurance to the hills, which have seen many wars come and go. It is an instinctive turning toward the immutable and eternal. How comforting, then, is the realization that there is something which we know to be eternal and immutable, even as the hills are not: Truth itself. There was a time when even these giants had not been formed; but at that time Truth was no older and no younger than now.

All the chariots of yesterday and all the explosives of today cannot make so much as the smallest dent in Truth. Yet something of this is symbolized by the hills. There is not, and cannot be, any battle between the mist and the mountain. The mist may hide the peaks from the toilers in the valley, but it cannot injure them: some day, sooner or later, it must roll away and reveal them. So Truth remains intact, inviolable. Ignorance or fear or self-interest may conceal it but nothing that anyone can do be he tyrant or slave, wise in the world's wisdom or foolish, can alter one jot or tittle of it; and sooner or later it will stand revealed.

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