d have had that desire gratified to the limit of
their expectation, can enter into the deep thankfulness and content that
filled the heart upon the descent of this mountain. There was no pride
of conquest, no trace of that exultation of victory some enjoy upon the
first ascent of a lofty peak, no gloating over good fortune that had
hoisted us a few hundred feet higher than others who had struggled and
been discomfited. Rather was the feeling that a privileged communion
with the high places of the earth had been granted; that not only had we
been permitted to lift up eager eyes to these summits, secret and
solitary since the world began, but to enter boldly upon them, to take
place, as it were, domestically in their hitherto sealed chambers, to
inhabit them, and to cast our eyes down from them, seeing all things as
they spread out from the windows of heaven itself.

Into this strong yet serene emotion, into this reverent elevation of
spirit, came with a shock a recollection of some recent reading.

Oh, wisdom of man and the apparatus of the sciences, the little columns
of mercury that sling up and down, the vacuum boxes that expand and
contract, the hammer that chips the highest rocks, the compass that
takes the bearings of glacier and ridge--all the equipage of hypsometry
and geology and geodesy--how pitifully feeble and childish it seems to
cope with the majesty of the mountains! Take them all together, haul
them up the steep, and as they lie there, read, recorded, and done for,
which shall be more adequate to the whole scene--their records?--or that
simple, ancient hymn, "We praise Thee, O God!--Heaven and earth are full
of the majesty of Thy Glory!" What an astonishing thing that, standing
where we stood and seeing what we saw, there are men who should be able
to deduce this law or that from their observation of its working and yet
be unable to see the Lawgiver!--who should be able to push back effect
to immediate cause and yet be blind to the Supreme Cause of All Causes;
who can say, "This is the glacier's doing and it is marvellous in our
eyes," and not see Him "Who in His Strength setteth fast the mountains
and is girded with power," Whose servants the glaciers, the snow, and
the ice are, "wind and storm fulfilling His Word"; who exult in the
exercise of their own intelligences and the playthings those
intelligences have constructed and yet deny the Omniscience that endowed
them with some minute fragment of Itself