How I mourn over life’s pettinesses! How I grieve, in my better mountain hours, to find myself always easily moved and disturbed, either to enjoyment or vexation, by the merest and most absolute trifles! How bitter it is to me, next time I get the wider view, to perceive how easily, and naturally, and contemptibly, I descended, after the last ascent, down among the thronging, chafing, soul-lowering interests and phantasies of this lower world, this span-long life again! Ah, spark of the Infinite, that finite things can so absorb thee! Ah, heir of Eternity, that time’s dancing motes can affect thee so much! Ah, member of Christ, child of God and inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven, that it can much concern thee in what station of life, in what external condition, it may please Him that thou shouldst serve Him, here, and now, in this minute of space and time!
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In life’s morning we may all, I think, be said to stand on the mountain, and, although it be a morning view, made illusive by mist and early sunshine, obtain the widest, least petty, view. More wide, more noble, more expansive—all these the scope of youth’s sight must be conceded to be. There is not the suspicion, the narrow thought, the selfishness, the intent consideration of the present interest; there is a broader, more generous way of contemplating life than we shall find later in its course. Doubtless there is the greater proneness to be deceived. The eye is not yet trained to calculate distances; arduous undertakings are misjudged; easy attainments are regarded with admiration and awe; there are many mistakes, much proof of want of experience. But as life goes on, and as men descend to gain this knowledge and correctness of estimation, often the wider view narrows, the freer air is left behind, and the eye that roamed over and took in that nobler scope becomes shut in by surrounding trees and hedges into the range of but one small field. Could we, as a few have done, not barter youth’s aspirations and superb ideas for manhood’s experience and practical mind, but add the riches of manhood to the riches of youth, how much greater a thing we might make this life of ours to be! For certainly in youth we do stand upon an eminence, and look round upon counties and hills, and gradually, as manhood gains upon us, are apt to descend towards mere gardens, fields, and fences.
And so the evil to be guarded against—or to be deplored—will be the declension of the mind and heart from this wider, more open and generous view, a loss inward, not outward. Mixing, as we soon must, among life’s pettinesses, how many of us forget the mountain upon which we once stood, nor care to ascend it still from time to time, but are content to sink into hardness, coldness of heart, narrow-mindedness, selfishness, a cynical, unsympathetic temper, a habit of low suspicion, a littleness of caution, a close hand, an absorbed heart. So that we should try, from time to time, to draw apart from the highways and byways and crowded walks of life’s daily cares and concerns, and to ascend a point which overlooks them and brings them more into their just proportion with that wider view which diminishes if it does not absorb them.
In reading some of the highest poetry I have found this ascent gained. It carries you up into the ideal, from life’s mean realities and commonplaces; there is an atmosphere of honour and love and generosity; men think and act grandly, and money-getting is not the mainspring of all. And this is one profit of high and wholesome poetry, that it does water and keep alive those nobler greater ideas and yearnings that the dust of the world’s traffic might otherwise choke. For the heart’s true poetic sense (I do not mean mere sentimentality) is no doubt one of the links nearest to God in the chain which connects us with Him.
How much of the sublimest poetry we find, in truth, in the Bible. And here I would point out especially how we may indeed breathe a mountain air—indeed obtain a mountain view, namely, in the sacredly-kept times of morning devotional reading. In a trouble, whether a small worry or a crushing anguish, how sweet, when the time has come round for the reading and meditation on the things of Eternity and of God. How, as we go on with our upward winding path, the fret or the agony insensibly takes its place in the wider landscape, and diminishes by an imperceptible process from the exaggerated size it presented to us when we stood beside it on the plain. Other greater objects open upon our view, and attract our attention; the far scenery of God’s mighty workings widens out before us, and the vast Ocean of Eternity stretching round and embracing the little island of Time; and we seem to feel a cool air fanning our hot tear-tired eyes, and we breathe more freely, and our heart, despite of itself, loses somewhat of its weary load. The world is left below; even the clouds sleep under our feet; and heaven is nearer, not only for that hour, but during the rest of the day.
And how naturally may this thought of mountain-quiet and distance from earth’s noises lead us to the consideration of that most exquisite and precious communion with God which we know by the name of Prayer. In associating the time of prayer with the idea of mountain seclusion, two pictures rise at once before the mind, because in them actually a mountain was the scene, and not only the type, of earnest and retired prayer. We see first the top of Carmel, bare and burnt under the sun of Palestine, and overlooking the intensely blue sea. Upon it the solitary prophet Elijah bends to the ground, prostrate on the earth, with his face between his knees. A watching form stands on a point towards the sea, until, at last, far away over the water, in the sultry horizon, a little dark speck, like a man’s hand, arises, and, on rapid wing, the delicious cool clouds gather and spread their awning between the burnt earth and the pitiless sun. Then the glorious sudden rush of the restoring rain, steady, incessant, abundant, settling in pools on the caked ground, streaming down the sides of the orange hills, sending eddying torrents to brim the parched cracked river-beds. Thus impetuous and profuse came the answer to the prophet’s lonely mountain prayer.
And another dearer picture we never weary of contemplating; another account of One who, after the day’s toil of healing, of teaching, of feeding the multitudes, sends the thronging crowd away, dismisses even His disciples in a ship across the lake, and then, when
“The feast is o’er, the guests are gone,
And over all that upland lone,
The breeze of eve sweeps wildly as of old,”