for the work of death, the ministrants come
to Him from the grave.

But from the grave conquered. One, from that tomb under Abarim, which
His own hand had sealed so long ago; the other from the rest into which
he had entered, without seeing corruption. There stood by Him Moses and
Elias, and spake of His decease.

Then, when the prayer is ended, the task accepted, first, since the
star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full glory falls upon Him from
heaven, and the testimony is borne to his everlasting Sonship and power.
"Hear ye him."

If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavor to
follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of by-gone days,
closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot sometimes, and
sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the active world, we may
perhaps pardon them more easily than we ought to pardon ourselves, if we
neither seek any influence for good nor submit to it unsought, in scenes
to which thus all the men whose writings we receive as inspired,
together with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task or trial
laid upon them needing more than their usual strength of spirit. Nor,
perhaps, should we have unprofitably entered into the mind of the
earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, as we watch the chains of the
snowy mountains rise on the horizon, we should sometimes admit the
memory of the hour in which their Creator, among their solitudes,
entered on His travail for the salvation of our race; and indulge the
dream, that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the earth seem to
be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on Sinai,--these pure
and white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of all good to the
earth, are the appointed memorials of that Light of His Mercy, that
fell, snow-like, on the Mount of Transfiguration.

FOOTNOTES

[106] In tracing the _whole_ of the deep enjoyment to mountain
association, I of course except whatever feelings are connected with
the observance of rural life, or with that of architecture. None of
these feelings arise out of the landscape, properly so-called: the
pleasure with which we see a peasant's garden fairly kept, or a
ploughman doing his work well, or a group of children playing at a
cottage door, being wholly separate from that which we find in the
fields or commons around them; and the beauty of architecture, or
the associations connected with it, in li