sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be
tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world
on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical
to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among
the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the
strange panorama of splintered crag and hanging ice-fall was there at
all. It certainly is not there with any reference to man--at least it
is hard to believe that it is all there that human beings may take a
refreshing holiday in the midst of it. When one penetrates Switzerland
by the green pine-clad valleys, passing through and beneath those
delicious upland villages, each clustering round a church with a
glittering cupola, the wooden houses with their brown fronts, their big
eaves, perched up aloft at such pleasant angles, one thinks of
Switzerland as an inhabited land of valleys, with screens and
backgrounds of peaks and snowfields; but when one goes up higher still,
and gets up to the top of one of the peaks, one sees that Switzerland
is really a region of barren ridges, millions of acres of cold stones
and ice, with a few little green cracks among the mountain bases, where
men have crept to live; and that man is only tolerated there.

One day I was out with a guide on a peak at sunrise. Behind the bleak
and shadowy ridges there stole a flush of awakening dawn; then came a
line of the purest yellow light, touching the crags and snowfields with
sharp blue shadows; the lemon-coloured radiance passed into fiery gold,
the gold flushed to crimson, and then the sun leapt into sight, and
shed the light of day upon the troubled sea of mountains. It was more
than that--the hills made, as it were, the rim of a great cold shadowy
goblet; and the light was poured into it from the uprushing sun, as
bubbling and sparkling wine is poured into a beaker. I found myself
thrilled from head to foot with an intense and mysterious rapture. What
did it all mean, this awful and resplendent solemnity, full to brim of
a solitary and unapproachable holiness? What was the secret of the
thing? Perhaps every one of those stars that we had seen fade out of
the night was ringed round by planets such as ours, peopled by forms
undreamed of; doubtless on millions of globes, the daylight of some
central sun was coming in glory over the cold ridges, and waking into
life sentient beings, in lands outside our