Holy mountain

“ We have the Lord Himself called a mountain by the Prophet, as it is written, “The stone that was cut out without hands grew to the size of a mountain.” [14] But this cannot be taken of His Person, unless peradventure He would speak thus, out of myself, as of His holy mountain He heard me, when He dwelt in me, that is, in this very mountain. But it is more plain and unembarrassed, if we understand that God out of His justice heard. ”

“ Each cloud-capped mountain is a holy altar;
An organ breathes in every grove;
And the full heart's a Psalter,
Rich in deep hymns of gratitude and love! ”

“ Note the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains as they rise from the plains, their peaks snow-capped, glistening in clear blue sky, breathe the pure essence of life, drink of the crystal streams twinkling down their sides, then scorn the wine made by man. Listen to the salute of the bells and the whistles as the trains approach and pass that strange monument of nature's handiwork, the Mount of the Holy Cross. ”

“ The base of the mountain is fringed with pines, but the cones are ash-colored and bare, being utterly devoid of vegetation, except what grows in the numerous clefts and ravines. This serrated mountain, standing isolated in a broad plain, strange and solitary, seems set apart by nature for some exceptional purpose. It looks like a vast temple consecrated to the Divinity. Even the Romans thought so when they set up their altars on its cliffs. It is the very place for the gods to sit apart, each on his own pinnacle, and talk from peak to peak, and reason high, and arbitrate the fate of man. ”

“ Such were some of the thoughts which this mysterious mountain inspired in primitive minds. To them whatever of nature was strange, beautiful, sublime, or powerful, was worshipful. It was not unnatural that the mountain should become dominant in their religious system. Sun worshipers already, what sublimer, nobler idolatry could there be than theirs for this priest of the sun in the land of undimmed heavens! Even the pilgrim of to-day would fain uncover and bend the knee before its tonsured head. ”

“ Deep, vast canyons, all trending westwards, lie in purple gloom. Pine-clad ranges, rising into the blasted top of Storm Peak, all run westwards too, and all the beauty and glory are but the frame out of which rises—heaven-piercing, pure in its pearly luster, as glorious a mountain as the sun tinges red in either hemisphere—the splintered, pinnacled, lonely, ghastly, imposing, double-peaked summit of Long's Peak, the Mont Blanc of Northern Colorado. ”

“ It is God's law, given to the children of men amid the thunders of Mount Sinai when the whole mountain was black with a thick cloud of smoke, which rolled away as from a great furnace into the sky. God descended in fire upon the mount. ”

“ Here among the majesty and stillness of the White Mountains was a song most fitting and infinitely beautiful to express their loveliness. It seemed to have in it the purity and depth of crystal clear lakes; the solemn and shadowy grandeur of hemlock forests, the faint, far-away spirit music of mountain echoes, the calm serenity of evening skies, the prayers and hopes and longings of all creation. With such a prelude as this did we behold the coming of the dawn. Nature had erected an emerald portal for the triumphal entry of the king of day. ”

“ On Mountain Tops the Mount of God ON mountain tops the mount of God
In latter days, shall rise
Above the summit of the hills,
And draw the wond'ring eyes.
To this the joyful nations round,
All tribes and tongues shall flow ”

“ The rivers, cleansed from all stain of early turbulence in the calm of heaven-reflecting lakes, are seen to set forth, at first gently directed and compelled by the lower hills, for the great plain where each has its own mission of life and bounty to fulfil. We are no longer, like the old-world theologian, frightened into thinking our mountain a monument of man's wickedness and God's anger, or like the modern philosopher, oppressed by the bulk of the giant ”

“ At the end of the valley and above the glacier Everest rises not so much a peak as a prodigious mountain-mass. There is no complication for the eye. The highest of the world's great mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy. ”

“ At such moments the climber's toil is richly paid. Over his head stretches the pure vault of the sky, below lies a vast expanse of earth; the mountain-top seems poised between the two, a point in the centre of a hollow globe. From the refulgent snows of the neighbouring peak, glittering with such excess of light as to be scarcely endurable, the eye turns for relief to gaze up into the intense colour of the zenith, or wanders over miles of green and countless changes of blue distances to the saffron of the extreme chain which forms the link between earth and heaven. ”

“ These vast steps are often seen where a glacier moves down a steep and irregular slope.
Old Virgil's gibe at mankind's better half—"varium et mutabile semper femina"—might have been written of this fickle shape of rock and ice and vapor. One tries vainly, year after year, to define it in his own mind. The daily, hourly change of distance, size and aspect, tricks which the Indian's mountain (p. 018) god plays with the puny creatures swarming more and more about his foot ”

“ No wonder that this mountain of changing moods, overtopping every other eminence in the Northwest, answered the idea of God to the simple, imaginative mind of the Indians who hunted in the forest on its slopes or fished in the waters of Whulge that ebbed and flowed at its base. Primitive peoples in every land have deified superlative manifestations of nature—the sun, the wind, great rivers, and waterfalls, the high mountains. ”

“ From the nature of our proceedings, the fruitfulness of the mountains, the rich variety around, and the impregnable fortress of the mountains behind, Elder Snow proposed that this mountain be known among the people of God, henceforth and forever, as Mount Brigham, and the rock upon which we stood the Rock of Prophecy. ”

“ No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a virginal mountain, distant from human inquisitiveness as a marble goddess is from human loves. Yet there was nothing unsympathetic in its isolation, or despotic in its distant majesty. ”

“ The whole mountain appeared as one glorious manifestation of divine power, enthusiastic and benevolent, glowing like a countenance with ineffable repose and beauty, before which we could only gaze in devout and lowly admiration. ”

“ THE MOUNTAIN THAT WAS "GOD." I. MOUNT "BIG SNOW" AND INDIAN TRADITION. Long hours we toiled up through the solemn wood,
Beneath moss-banners stretched from tree to tree;
At last upon a barren hill we stood,
And, lo, above loomed Majesty.
—Herbert Bashford: "Mount Rainier."
The great Mountain fascinates us by its diversity. It is an inspiration and yet a riddle to all who are drawn to the mysterious or who love the sublime. Every view which the breaking clouds vouchsafe to us is a surprise. It never becomes commonplace, save to the commonplace.
Ice Terraces on South Tahoma Glacier. ”

“ If the great mountain, with its stony peak shooting up into the sky, has sublimity of one kind, the wide expanse of open country, moor, or heath, or desert, with its limitless horizon and many-shaded lines, has it of another. To an eye and a heart alive to the impressions of the beautiful and the grand, something to charm and to elevate will be found in almost every aspect of nature. ”

“ Those on either side, which denote the roads of imperfection, are broad and somewhat tortuous and come to an end before the higher stages of the mount are reached. The centre road, that of perfection, is at first very narrow but gradually broadens and leads right up to the summit of the mountain, which only the perfect attain and where they enjoy the iuge convivium — the heavenly feast. The different zones of religious perfection, from which spring various virtues, are portrayed with much greater detail than in the first plan. ”

“ The summit is a ridge which slopes southward and northward to the two beautiful valleys of Yü-chia-k'uang and Chang-chia-shan. Once or twice a year a priest ascends the mountain from a temple far down on the western slope, and having reached the summit he burns a few sticks of incense and recites some Taoist prayers. Occasionally a villager climbs the mountain to return thanks to the Jade-Imperial-God or the spirit of the mountain for granting him success in some family matter or in business: but ordinarily the little group of gods on the hill-top are left in quietness and solitude. ”

“ Snows cover the top of this mountain both summer and winter; and when the sun in his strength shineth on the snows thereof, it is as though the glory of the Lord had come down from heaven. Towards this mountain Jesus had set his face, as though he had an errand thither from the Lord; and as we journeyed towards it, he gazed often thereon and rejoiced greatly. But it came to pass, as we now drew nigh unto the mountain, we journeyed through a certain village of the country ”

“ They reverence mountains and high hills as dwelling-places of the gods, and consider it a work of much merit to perform a pilgrimage to the temples which they build upon their summits. In some cases, they go farther, and consider the mountain itself to be a god. ”

“ Every evening she lingers on his summit, and when at last she leaves him, his lofty crest is bathed in soft purple light. In the evening the Matchless Mountain seems to rise higher and higher into the skies, until no mortal can tell the place of his rest. ”

“ This marvel of beauty and grandeur rising stark from the plain must have filled the man of the lowlands with awe and fear, and his fancy would readily people these inaccessible heights and gloomy forests with the marvels of primitive imagination. On the north the mountain rises by gentle wooded slopes to a height of nearly ten thousand feet above the plain, while on the south the summit ends in a tremendous precipice almost a mile up and down as though slashed off by the sword of a Titan. ”

“ In fact, the general lack of rugged escarpments as well as of great elevation leads the geographer to rank even the highest of these rounded summits as hills of large size rather than attempt to burden them with the dignity that the term mountain carries with it. They are beautiful hills, separated one from another by lovely valleys, which draw the beholder to them and fill his memory with tender longings and vague dreamy fancies such as the sterner grandeurs of great mountains fail to awaken. ”

“ What Mount Blanc as the king of the Alps is, lifting its crystal domes and towers 15,781 feet above the level of the Mediterranean Sea, compared with the other snow-clad and cloud-kissed mountains of the Alps, that Jesus Christ is compared with the loftiest men who have risen as mountain heights above their fellows through all the ages. ”

“ The mountain is seen to be vast, mighty, magnificent as it is not from any other point of view; its rivals are humbled, and its summit, gracious and noble rather than haughty, shines unquestionably the highest of all in the sky. ”

“ All other differences must fade when the Divine summits are placed in contrast with them; as from the top of an exceeding high mountain the whole ground beneath is as a level plain, because from that vast altitude all smaller elevations are lost, all minuter inequalities of surface vanish. ”

“ I have my doubts about all this real value in mountaineering, in getting to the top of everything and overlooking everything. Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. ”

“ But the mountain stands to catch the clouds, to win the blessing they bear, and send it down to moisten the fainting violet, to form streams which gladden valley and meadow, and sweep on at last to the sea in deep channels, laden with fleets. Thus the forms of the Church, the creeds of the sects, the conflicting opinions of teachers, float round the sides of the Christian mount, and swell and toss, and rise and fall, and dart their lightning, and roll their thunder, but they neither make nor mar the mount itself. ”

“ THE TWINS OF TABLE MOUNTAIN.
CHAPTER I.
A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.
They lived on the verge of a vast stony level, upheaved so far above the surrounding country that its vague outlines, viewed from the nearest valley, seemed a mere cloud-streak resting upon the lesser hills. The rush and roar of the turbulent river that washed its eastern base were lost at that height; the winds that strove with the giant pines that half way climbed its flanks spent their fury below the summit; for, at variance with most meteorological speculation, an eternal calm seemed to invest this serene altitude. ”

“ It is useless, when one mountain-top has been achieved, to find that after all there is nothing left except the inconsiderable [34] mountain itself,—it is useless then to discover upon an opposite summit, whose peak could be reached by a well-modulated voice, an extant church of indubitable antiquity, for to meet with that church would require an all-day’s walk. There was one steeple chase without even the comfort of another church in view. ”

“ A mountain, a fossil from deepest geological horizon, a ruin of human art, carry us back into the perspective of centuries with a force that has become, perhaps, a little conventional. No imperishableness{52} of mountain-peak or of fragment of human work, broken pillar or sand-worn image half lifted over pathetic desert,—none of these link the past and to-day with anything like the power of these monuments of living antiquity, trees that began to grow before the Christian era, and, full of hale vitality and green old age, still bid fair to grow broad and high for centuries to come. ”