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Cornell University Library 
 
 BS 660.S8 
 
 Outdoor men and minds, 
 
 3 1924 014 Oil 831 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014011831 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY WM. L. STIDGER 
 
 GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS 
 STAR DUST FROM THE DUGOUTS 
 
OUTDOOR 
 MEN AND MINDS 
 
 By 
 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER 
 
 A-V 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1920, by 
 WILLIAM L. STIDGER 
 
Dedicated to Mv Father 
 
 LEROY L. STIDGER 
 
 Who for Many Years Was 
 
 A Father-Mother to 
 
 Five Little Tots, and Who 
 
 Gave to Them a Heritage 
 
 Of Home and Love Which is 
 
 Better Than Gold 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Opening the Door . Bishop Wm. A. Quayle 1 1 
 
 Introduction 13 
 
 I. The Trees op the Bible 21 
 
 II. Storms of the Bible 4.2 
 
 III. The Mountains of the Bible 65 
 
 IV. Rivers of the Bible 82 
 
 V. The Bible and the Sea 94 
 
 VI. The Desert and the Bible iii 
 
 VII. The Stars and the Bible 122 
 
 VIII. The Birds of the Bible 140 
 
 IX. Burbank and the Book 164 
 
 X. MuiR and the Master 175 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING PAGB. 
 
 The vespers of a tree 9 
 
 "And the leaves of the tree were for the healing 
 of the nations" 21 
 
 "And a great and strong wind rent the moun- 
 tains" 43 
 
 "A sentinel pine on Mount Taishan, in China; said 
 to be the oldest worshiping place on earth". . 65 
 
 "He leadeth me beside the stiU waters" 83 
 
 "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and 
 here shall thy proud waves be stayed" 95 
 
 "The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; 
 and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as 
 the rose" in 
 
 "When I consider thy heavens" 123 
 
 "We spread our wings on the winds of light" 141 
 
 Climbing the dime 165 
 
 "I like sunshine, the blue sky, trees"— B«rJo»* 175 
 
THE VESPERS OF A TREE 
 
 A T evening time along the sea 
 
 I like to watch an ancient tree, 
 Where gently at the close of day 
 It bows its leafy head to pray. 
 
 This is the Vesper Hour of trees ; 
 
 There is an Angelus that rings 
 With sweetest music through the leaves- 
 
 An evening wind that softly sings. 
 
 Stand all alone and silently. 
 In mood of prayer and reverently, 
 And you shall see that gray old tree 
 At Vespers bowing wistfully. 
 
 .You'll hear a whisper soft and low, 
 As of One speaking tenderly. 
 
 And in the wandering winds that blow 
 You'll hear God talking to that tree. 
 
OPENING THE DOOR 
 By Bishop Wm. A. Quayle 
 
 TO write an introduction to this book 
 written by William L. Stidger is to 
 be classed under the Scripture head- 
 ing, "A Superfluity of Naughtiness." Reading 
 the chapter captions suffices to head one 
 straight into the book, like a diver plunging 
 into the sea. 
 
 Such as have read his war characterizations 
 and his interviews of soul with the poets of our 
 own times, and his wanderings in the Orient 
 looking for Christ along the ways of loneliness, 
 will need no informing that this book will be 
 worth reading. 
 
 This author has a seeing eye, and a hearing 
 ear, and an attent heart, and a poet pulse, and a 
 sense of yearning which is on all elect spirits. 
 He loves many things and matters and folks. 
 He is companionable. His enthusiasms are 
 wholesome and contagious. 
 
 It will be sweet to be with him out of doors, 
 with him anywhere, and will prove a sure 
 
 II 
 
12 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 delight to be with him in the Bible out of doors. 
 I open the door into this winsome, worthy book 
 which shall bring us to many a way and place 
 where we shall meet God face to face. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 RAYMOND ROBINS speaks in his 
 remarkable series of articles on Russia 
 ■ of the "Indoor Diplomacy" that so 
 bungled aflfairs during the crucial days of the 
 Great War. And he avers that "indoor diplo- 
 macy" is the direct result of an "indoor mind." 
 Certainly, the Book of books was not thought 
 out, conceived, nurtured or given birth by men 
 with "indoor minds"; rather it was produced 
 by men whose hearts and dreams and hopes 
 and thoughts were washed by the cleansing 
 rains, swept pure by the white winds, sanctified 
 by the purifying sunshine, baptized by the holy 
 dews of night and morning, lighted by star 
 light, perfumed by blossoming flowers and 
 trees, made strong by the iron of mountains, 
 and shot full of dreams by those who lived 
 amid the stars. The Bible is an out-of-doors 
 book. 
 
 It starts out in its first chapters with a great 
 outdoor story of creation and it ends up with a 
 great outdoor vision of things to be. The great 
 incidents of the Bible occur in the great open. 
 The great moments in the life of the great 
 
 13 
 
14 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 characters of the Bible, including Jesus the 
 Christ, are staged along the highways, beside 
 rivers and lakes, on some mountain height, or 
 in some green meadow. 
 
 We have this thought of the Bible as an out- 
 of-doors book in a general way, but when one 
 starts to investigate the thesis carefully he is 
 actually startled with the avalanche of evidence 
 that sweeps down upon him to pile up facts sup- 
 porting this truth. 
 
 The book of Genesis is itself a great ocean. 
 One walks along its shores all through that 
 book and hears, the first singing of the new- 
 born surf and the play of tides from the new 
 moon and the warmth of sunlight from the 
 new-born sun. 
 
 Every single incident of the book of Exodus 
 is an out-of-doors incident. He who doubts 
 this statement has but to read this wonderful 
 story from beginning to end. It deals with 
 out-of-doors men. men who never knew what 
 a roof was. 
 
 And while Leviticus deals largely with laws, 
 it too is a great open-air book, and "flocks" 
 and "herds" and "harvests" and "grains" 
 make up a large part of its thought. 
 
 Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles too are 
 largely out-of-doors chronicles, for they deal 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 with kingdoms and with wars ; and wars must 
 needs be fought out of doors. 
 
 Job is the only great drama in the world of 
 art that is too big to be staged any place but 
 out of doors. You can't confine a whirlwind 
 indoors and you can't stage a sky full of stars 
 within four meager walls. 
 
 The Psalms are limited only by the starry 
 skies, "the winds before the dawn," when "the 
 morning stars sing together," while "the hart 
 panteth after the waterbrook." 
 
 The great incidents of Isaiah are continu- 
 ally happening in the out-of-doors; on moun- 
 taintops, along city streets, accompanied by 
 storms, lightnings, thunderings. 
 
 The Prophets, each one of them and all of 
 them, were great, rugged men of skies and 
 mountains and "trimmers of sycamore trees." 
 Most of the disciples, Jesus Christ himself, and 
 Paul the "tent-maker," were men of the fields 
 and highways. Jesus was born in a stable and 
 died on a cross aa'd ascended from a mountain 
 peak. Paul was converted on a highway, and 
 the first four were called from the seashore. 
 
 The book of Revelation is a great Yosemite, 
 with voices, voices, voices sounding every- 
 where. 
 
 No indoor mind can fully understand the 
 
i6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Bible. Almost every parable that Jesus spoke 
 was a Parable of the Out-of-Doors. He was 
 talking to nomads and to agriculturists. 
 
 The great figures of speech of the Bible 
 are "shepherd," "herdsman," "vineyard," 
 "Saviour." 
 
 We never think of Christ as belonging in- 
 doors. He walked the highways, he prayed on 
 the mountainsides, he went into a garden, and 
 he died on a lonely hill. The few times that he 
 went inside one might count on the fingers of 
 one hand. We never think of God as an in- 
 doors God. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Paul, 
 Moses, John of Patmos, Jesus the Christ — 
 they were all too big to be confined. They 
 would not have felt at home indoors. We can- 
 not conceive of them belonging at any time in- 
 side of a church or a house. They worshiped 
 out of the walls of their times, they prophesied, 
 they preached from pulpits of great rocks and 
 mountainsides. Even David, the gentle poet 
 of them all, was from his days of herding 
 sheep to the end an out-of-doors man. 
 
 And because I have been so deeply impressed 
 with this great truth I make bold to call atten- 
 tion to the fact that the greatest incidents of 
 the Book of books occurred amid the moun- 
 tains, along the rivers and lakes ; in the deserts, 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 on the seas, and have to do with the trees, the 
 stars, the birds, and the storms of the Bible. 
 
 For perchance, when one catches this breath 
 of the good God's great open, and feels its 
 sunshine on his face, ever thereafter he may 
 not be able to sail a storm, or stand beneath 
 the shade of a tree, or hear sweet singing of a 
 bird, or sound of surf from sea or forest, catch 
 a daydawn, or a starlit night that Christ and 
 God seem not nearer. It is so with this humble 
 man: 
 
 I never see a lake or tree 
 
 But Christ is very near to me; 
 
 Nor ride an ocean in a storm 
 
 But through the dark I see His form ; 
 
 Remembering in the other years 
 
 He walked the waves and calmed the fears 
 
 Of men like unto me; 
 
 And died upon a tree. 
 
 I never see a shining star 
 
 On the horizon, still and far. 
 
 Nor walk the fields at night. 
 
 But I can see the light 
 
 Which shone so long ago 
 
 On watching shepherds there below; 
 
 And angel voices sing to me 
 
 Of Him who came triumphantly. 
 
 No sunset glows along the sky 
 Nor soft wind passes by 
 But somehow He is very near 
 And close to me; and dear 
 
i8 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 As memories of other days 
 
 When He too walked these wind-washed ways 
 
 Of earth and felt the glow 
 
 And glory of the world I know. 
 
 I never walk along the way 
 
 Of mountain paths when somber day 
 
 Has died behind the west; 
 
 And feel the touch of earth's warm breast 
 
 But I remember 'twas His way ; 
 
 He sought the mountain sides to pray 
 
 Beneath the trees and stars of night; 
 
 To wait the dawn and catch the light ! 
 
 I never see a grove of trees 
 But He is there upon His knees; 
 Nor walk, however joyfully, 
 Through garden ways but I can see 
 My Christ in His Gethsemane; 
 His triumph and His victory ; 
 The rock-strewn pathway of His tears, 
 The garden of His human fears. 
 
 So rocks and lakes and storms and trees; 
 So meadow-lands and stars and seas ! 
 Flowers and birds and mountain-ways ; 
 The dawning and the dying days ; 
 The silent watches of the night; 
 The darkness, fogs — ^the clouds — the light 
 Through magic mists of memory 
 Bring Jesus very close to me." 
 
 The author desires to thank the pubHshers 
 for permission to quote the following: Extracts 
 from John Muir, granted by Houghton Mifflin 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 Company; the paragraphs on Brashear, the 
 star-man, granted by the American Magazine ; 
 the lines from Robert Service, granted by 
 Barse & Hopkins; "Trees," by Joyce Kilmer, 
 granted by George H. Doran Company; and 
 the storm description in the chapter on 
 "storms," taken from "The Land of To- 
 Morrow," the author of which is Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, published by George H. Doran 
 Company, and to Luther Burbank, who 
 granted the author an interview and gave per- 
 mission to quote the paragraphs in the chapter 
 on that great scientist. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 
 
 "I think that I shall never see 
 A poem lovely as a tree. 
 
 "A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed 
 Against the earth's sweet flowing breast; 
 
 "A tree that looks at God all day, 
 And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 
 
 "A tree, that may, in Summer, wear 
 A nest of robins in her hair ; 
 
 "Upon whose bosom inow has lain; 
 Who intimately lives with rain. 
 
 "Poems are made by fools like me. 
 But only God can make a tree." 
 
 SO writes Joyce Kilmer, he who died on 
 the battlefields of tree-dead France. 
 And surely God must have had a joy 
 in making trees; such joy as a poet has in 
 making poems in his small way; and surely 
 God must have wanted to call the attention of 
 the world to His trees and to their spiritual 
 
 21 
 
22 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 lessons, for so many times in the Book of books 
 He puts it into the hearts of those who speak 
 and write His words to use trees as figures of 
 speech to make emphatic or tender or pertinent 
 some great spiritual truth that He wishes to 
 convey to mankind down through the coming 
 generations. 
 
 And so God made his trees not only to be 
 useful to mankind with their food and shade, 
 but he also made them to teach mankind 
 spiritual truths. 
 
 The Bible, from beginning to end, is full of 
 trees. The Bible is like a great highway from 
 the beginning of time until the end of Revela- 
 tion, and all along that great highway irov^ the 
 Atlantic Coast of Genesis and the Creation, to 
 the Pacific Coast of the book of Revelation, 
 shading the humanity that walks its myriad 
 way, feeding and comforting, are trees — trees 
 of every kind. 
 
 Some of the trees of the Holy Land and 
 Syria, where Jesus was wont to walk, are: 
 tamarisk, orange, lemon, citrus, maple, sumach, 
 moringa, acacia, almond, cherry, plum, apple, 
 pear, hawthorn, olive, fir, elm, mulberry, fig, 
 sycamore, walnut, alder, ironwood, hazel, oak, 
 beech, willow, poplar, cypress, jtmiper, y^v\_ 
 pine, cedar, spruce, palm. 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 23 
 
 Hastings says that the mountains and hills 
 and valleys of the Holy Land are now for the 
 most part bare of their trees. In the days of 
 Christ they were covered with great forests. 
 
 One of the most beautiful legends I take 
 from Hastings. It is that of "The Tree," 
 which is by inference "The Cross." "The 
 name no doubt originated because of the prac- 
 tice of employing a tree in case of haste for the 
 purpose of crucifixion." 
 
 Many references in the New Testament 
 refer to "the tree," meaning the cross of Christ. 
 
 In mediaeval times there was a legend which 
 told of how Adam, when he was dying, sent 
 his son Seth to the angel that guarded paradise 
 to beg a bough from the Tree of Life. The 
 angel granted this request, but when Seth got 
 back to his father, he found him dead. So he 
 planted the bough of the tree on Adam's grave. 
 In the course of time Solomon was building the 
 temple and cut the tree down to use in the 
 temple, but it refused to be fitted into any part 
 of the temple, so he used it for a bridge over a 
 stream. By and by the Queen of Sheba came 
 to visit Solomon, and refused to walk over that 
 tree because she recognized that it was the tree 
 on which the Saviour was to die. Long after- 
 ward the Jews took the tree and cast it into a 
 
24 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 stagnant pool. From that time on the tree 
 gave this pool miraculous healing powers; an 
 angel descended from time to time and troubled 
 the waters, and whoever stepped into the 
 waters immediately after this troubling was 
 healed of diseases. There it remained until 
 Christ was crucified, and then it was taken 
 from the pool and fashioned into a cross on 
 which the Saviour of the world died. 
 
 Hastings also calls attention to the interest- 
 ing fact that "The fathers loved to contrast the 
 first tree whose fruit brought death into the 
 world, and the second tree whose leaves are for 
 the healing of the nations." 
 
 Old Testament Trees 
 
 The first reference to trees is in Genesis 3. 
 22-24. It is a figure of speech that runs all 
 through the Bible. It gets its start early. 
 
 "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is 
 become as one of us, to know good and evil: 
 and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take 
 also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for- 
 ever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth 
 from the garden of Eden, to till the ground 
 from whence he was taken." 
 
 It is an intensely dramatic picture and it is 
 followed by one just as dramatic; even spec- 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 25 
 
 tacular. It is the picture of a flaming sword 
 guarding that important tree of life : 
 
 "So he drove out the man ; and he placed at 
 the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubims, 
 and a flaming sword which turned every way, 
 to keep the way of the tree of life." 
 
 As it is to-day both the living and the dead 
 find rest under the beneficent shade of the quiet 
 old trees. Many a child has known the joy of 
 a shady tree after a long, hard, hot walk on a 
 summer day. And we who study trees to-day 
 must remember that Palestine is a hot country 
 and the shade of a friendly tree was more than 
 welcome. And what man, woman, or child in 
 this day and nation who does not have a 
 memory of a little God's Acre shaded by pro- 
 tecting trees ? 
 
 All over New England one remembers the 
 little cemeteries in a circle of pine trees where 
 the dead rest withpatches of sunlight playing on 
 white, moss-touched tombs. Some of them were 
 leaders in the Revolutionary War; some of 
 them were great poets; some were Presidents 
 and some were musicians ; but all of them rest 
 where the blue flower raises its petals in spring- 
 time, and where a carpet of pine needles makes 
 soft the tread of reverent feet. Ofttimes stone 
 walls hold the world at respectful distance, and 
 
26 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 through the centuries they sleep beneath the 
 trees. In fact, it seems to be a well established 
 custom to surround cemeteries with trees. 
 
 So it was in Old Testament times. Both the 
 dead and the living rested beneath the shady 
 trees. Two references will give these pictures : 
 
 First Samuel, chapter thirty-one, verse 
 thirteen, gives this vivid picture: "And they 
 took their bones, and buried them under a tree 
 at Jabesh." 
 
 There is a beautiful picture of the visit of the 
 three angels and Jehovah to Abraham. The 
 story is in the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, 
 and it starts off : "And Jehovah appeared unto 
 him in the plains of Mamre:' and he sat in 
 the tent door in the heat of the day." 
 
 What child or grown-up shall ever cease to 
 be stirred with Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the 
 tree, as described in the fourth chapter of 
 Daniel ? "Thus were the visions of mine head 
 in my bed ; I saw, and behold a tree in the midst 
 of the earth, and the height thereof was great. 
 The tree grew, and was strong, and the height 
 thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight 
 thereof to the end of all the earth. The leaves 
 thereof were fair, and the fruit thereof much, 
 and in it was meat for all : the beasts of the 
 
 'Revised Version, "oaks of Mamre." 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 27 
 
 field had shadow under it, and the fowls of the 
 heaven dwelt in the boughs thereof, and all 
 flesh was fed of it." 
 
 The Bible reader will remember the rest of 
 the story. It was that a man appeared out of 
 heaven and cut this tree down, and scattered 
 its leaves over the face of the earth, but left the 
 roots thereof. The old king wanted an inter- 
 pretation of what his dream meant and brave 
 Daniel told him without a moment's hesitation. 
 He told him that it meant that the tree was the 
 king, and that God would cut him down in 
 spite of his power until he recognized Jehovah 
 as King over all the earth; but that if he did 
 recognize him, the promise of the remain- 
 ing root was that his kingdom should grow 
 again. 
 
 The fable of Jotham in the ninth chapter of 
 Judges is intensely interesting from the stand- 
 point of the story itself, without reference to 
 its interpretation, which is too complicated for 
 this chapter — a matter which more rightly 
 belongs to another type of book. But it is in- 
 teresting in reference to the subject. It starts 
 in the eighth verse and is a simple story: 
 
 "The trees went forth on a time to anoint a 
 king over them; and they said unto the olive 
 tree, Reign thou over us. But the olive tree 
 
28 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 said unto them, Should I leave my fatness 
 wherewith by me they honor God and man, and 
 go to be promoted over the trees? And the 
 trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign 
 over us. But the fig tree said unto them, 
 Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good 
 fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees? 
 Then said the trees unto the vine. Come thou, 
 and reign over us. And the vine said unto 
 them. Should I leave my new wine, which 
 cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted 
 over the trees? Then said all the trees unto 
 the bramble. Come thou, and reign over us. 
 And the bramble said unto the trees. If in 
 truth ye anoint me king over you, then come 
 and put your trust in my shadow : and if not, let 
 fire come out of the bramble, and devour the 
 cedars of Lebanon." 
 
 The juniper, which is called a tree, is not 
 really a tree, so I make no reference to it. It 
 was merely a low bush. Many people believe 
 that the Lebanon is a tree, because they have 
 so often heard quoted the expression, "the trees 
 of Lebanon"; but a careful investigation will 
 discover that Lebanon is a mountain, and the 
 figure of speech merely refers to the trees that 
 grow on this rugged range — "the cedars of 
 Lebanon." And some of the descriptions of 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 29 
 
 storms sweeping through the trees of Lebanon 
 are among the most vivid descriptions in the 
 whole Bible. These occur in the Psalms, and 
 no storm descriptions have ever surpassed 
 them. 
 
 Amos was called a "trimmer" (or pincher) 
 of sycamore trees. It was a profession. It 
 was a most humble profession. The "trimmer," 
 or "pincher," went about pinching the bark of 
 the tree, and a fruit grew from that pinch. It 
 was a fruit eaten by the very poor, but never- 
 theless had a certain food value. 
 
 A tree had much to do with Jeremiah's call 
 to be a prophet. The sight of an almond tree, 
 which was the first tree to put out leaves in 
 early spring, suggested the care and ever 
 kindly presence of Jehovah. He speaks of this 
 in the first chapter and eleventh verse : 
 
 "Moreover the word of the Lord came unto 
 me, saying, Jeremiah, what seest thou? And 
 I said, I see a rod of an almond tree. Then 
 said the Lord unto me. Thou hast well seen: 
 for I will hasten my word to perform it." 
 
 This undoubtedly made a vivid, a burning 
 impression on the great prophet Jeremiah. 
 
 Many times Jeremiah refers to trees to im- 
 press his lessons on his hearers "whilst their 
 children remember their altars and their 
 
30 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Asherim by the green trees upon the high 
 hills." 
 
 The New Testament Tree Scenes 
 
 All told, there are more than five hundred 
 references in the Bible to trees which the 
 writer has found. These take the form of 
 figures of speech, of great scenes which have 
 taken place under trees, of names of the 
 various trees of Palestine and Syria, of great 
 spiritual teachings and parables. The Old 
 Testament is full of such references, but the 
 New Testament is not far behind it. 
 
 There is the beautiful story of Jesus and the 
 early morning walk and the parable of the fig 
 tree. There is the story of the tree up into 
 which Zacchaeus, a small man, climbed, that he 
 might see over the heads of those who crowded 
 about Jesus as he passed ; there is the story of 
 Jesus calling Nathanael — "When thou wast 
 under the fig tree, I saw thee;" there is the 
 story of the little trees in Gethsemane, and at 
 last of the tree on which Jesus was slain on 
 Calvary. 
 
 It is a striking thing that attracts the atten- 
 tion, not only of "the fathers" but also of the 
 sons and of the succeeding generations of 
 preachers and prophets and authors, that in the 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 31 
 
 opening chapters of Genesis comes that great, 
 striking figure of speech, "the tree of Hfe," 
 with its vivid story, and also at the very end of 
 the Bible, in the last chapter of Revelation, in 
 the vision of John, a final reference is made to 
 the "tree of life." Thus is the first chapter 
 linked with the last, although many centuries 
 intervened, an infinite number of things had 
 come to pass, and the book had passed through 
 innumerable hands : 
 
 "And he showed me a pure river of water of 
 life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the 
 throne of God and of the Lamb. In the mids* 
 of the street of it, and on ieither side of the 
 river, was there the tree of life, which bore 
 twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit 
 every month: and the leaves of the tree were 
 for the healing of the nations." 
 
 Contemporary Literature Uses the Figure 
 OF Trees for Spiritual Lessons 
 
 It is fascinating to see how from the open- 
 ing chapters of the Bible to the last chapter 
 the tree is used as a medium of conveying great 
 spiritual truths to humanity. It is used by 
 poet, prophet, and preacher; it is used in the 
 Psalms, in Proverbs, in Job, in the prophecies, 
 and in the New Testament. It is frequently 
 
32 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 used by Jesus. It is also often used by con- 
 temporary poets for the purpose of conveying 
 spiritual truths. 
 
 I have referred already to perhaps the most 
 popular of all poems on the tree, that written 
 by the late Joyce Kilmer, who seems to sum up 
 all of the spiritual interpretation of the life of 
 a tree in his wonderful couplets, ending with 
 that memorable phrase of humility in the 
 presence of a tree : 
 
 "Poems are made by fools like me. 
 But only God can make a tree." 
 
 One can never think of trees and their 
 spiritual lessons that one does not think of 
 
 "Winds of the east, winds of the west. 
 
 Wandering to and fro. 
 Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs 
 
 That the world of men may know 
 That the lordly Pine was the first to come 
 
 And the Pine shall be last to go. 
 
 "Sun, moon, and stars give answer: 
 
 'Shall we not staunchly stand 
 Even as noiV, forever, 
 
 Lords of the last lone land; 
 Sentinels of the stillness. 
 Wards of the wilder strand ?' " 
 
 {The Spell of the Yukon.) 
 
 Bryant's immortal line, "The groves were 
 God's first temples," and Hood's boyhood 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 33 
 
 memory sweeps us back with a sigh to other, 
 sweeter days : 
 
 "I remember, I remember 
 
 The fir trees dark and high; 
 I used to think their tender tops 
 
 Were close against the sky. 
 It was a childish fancy. 
 
 But it gives me little joy 
 To know I'm further off from heaven 
 
 Than when I was a boy." 
 
 Alexander Smith repeats the thought that 
 Joyce Kilmer suggests of the trees praying: 
 
 "The trees were gazing up into the sky. 
 Their bare arms stretched in prayer for the snows." 
 
 Nor shall one ever cease to hear the music: 
 of Sidney Lanier's "Little gray leaves that 
 were kind to Him," and "The olive trees"" 
 which "had a mind to Him," as "Into the 
 woods He went." 
 
 Spiritual Lessons from the Bible 
 
 Lesson I. The Good Man Shall Grow Like a 
 Mighty Tree 
 This spiritual figure of speech runs like the 
 sound of sweet music in the treetops all through 
 the Book, It is not forgotten and unto the last 
 a sweet note of music — the music of hope — is 
 played. It sings itself like the sound of a 
 
34 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 silvery stream beside which "the tree of life" 
 grows, bearing its twelve manner of fruits. 
 Perhaps the most simple and the most beautiful 
 putting of God's promise to the good man is 
 that found in Jeremiah, chapter seventeen, 
 verses 7, 8 : "Blessed is the man that trusteth 
 in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For 
 he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and 
 that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and 
 shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf 
 shall be green; and shall not be careful in the 
 year of drought, neither shall cease from yield- 
 ing fruit." 
 
 Lesson 11. A Tree Is Known by the Fruit It 
 Yields 
 
 This great spiritual lesson is repeated over 
 and over through the Bible. Writer after 
 writer uses the figure ; poet after poet since has 
 copied the thought — that a tree is known by 
 its fruit. If a man is good, he brings forth 
 good fruit; if he is bad, he brings forth bad 
 fruit. A good heart will blossom and come 
 forth to fruitage with love and tenderness an3 
 kindly and kingly deeds. A man with evil in 
 his heart will give forth hate and hurt and 
 heartache and heartbreak in life. Matthew 12. 
 33 says, "The tree is known by its fruits." 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 35 
 
 Lesson III. A Tree that Yields No Fruit 
 Should Be Cut Down 
 
 This fruit may be the fruit of shade or the 
 fruit of food ; but no tree has any right to Hve 
 and absorb moisture and health from the soil 
 and not produce. This lesson might be carried 
 out into its social implications : the wealthy, who 
 live as a burden on society, and who never pro- 
 duce, but always live as parasites on social life ; 
 the criminal; the selfish. It has tremendous 
 social spiritual imports. 
 
 Lesson IV. There Is Hope for Even a Half- 
 Dead Tree if It Be Grafted on a New Tree 
 So, in one figure that the Bible uses, an 
 almond tree is asked if it does not want to be 
 grafted on to the olive tree that it may "enrich 
 itself from my fatness." And so a human life 
 that is half dead and fruitless and worthless, 
 grafted on the tree of the living Christ, may 
 yet live to redeem and refresh the world. In a 
 later chapter on Luther Burbank we shall see 
 how this great plant-breeder uses this spiritual 
 truth. 
 
 Lesson V. "My Beloved Is an Apple Tree" 
 
 We have a friend in the church who 
 
 preached a sermon on this text. His name is 
 
36 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Huse. He took the words : "As the apple tree 
 among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved 
 among the sons. I sat down under his shadow 
 with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to 
 my taste." It is from the Song of Solomon, 
 the second chapter and the third verse, and it 
 is sweet music and a captivating figure of 
 speech. Our friend calls attention to the fact 
 of boyhood memories of apple trees. He says, 
 "It is a friendly tree." It is like a mother hen. 
 It tucks you under the shade of its wings. It 
 is like a friendly father. It lets you climb all 
 over it. It is like an old family umbrella; it 
 shelters everybody. It is beautiful with blos- 
 som in the spring when it feeds the bees. It 
 is beautiful with fruit in the fall when it feeds 
 humanity. It is beautiful with snow in the 
 winter ; with snow blossoms and snow flowers. 
 It is beautiful with memory all the years when 
 its sight has gone from you. Then he calls 
 attention to the "Apple Tree Man." He's a 
 good kind to marry. He's a good kind for a 
 preacher. He's a good kind for a city man- 
 ager. He's a good kind for a husband. 
 
 Tree Friends 
 
 I remember an old early harvest apple tree 
 in an orchard of boyhood days ; I remember an 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 37 
 
 oak that grew at the top of the old Indian 
 mound. I remember a beech, with white, 
 smooth bark that we used to cut our initials in 
 of a summer afternoon when time was all gold 
 and silver and we had plenty of it. I remember 
 an old willow tree that overhung the "Old 
 Sheep Hole." I remember a giant pine that 
 used to swing and sway in winter winds 
 against the walls of the house where as a boy 
 I slept. I remember that wild, brilliant crim- 
 son blanketed Flame of the Forest of the tropic 
 lands ; it burned its beauteous way into my soul 
 forever. I cannot forget the graceful, singing, 
 swinging, swaying, slender grace of the bam- 
 boo on many a tropical stream; born in the 
 springtime, matured by midsummer, more like 
 a flower than a tree. Nor shall anyone be so 
 dead of soul as to forget the coconut palm in its 
 myriad fruitful, bounteous, beautiful varieties 
 throughout the Orient. I remember, and shall 
 always remember, a pepper tree in San Jose. 
 I have awakened at night and have seen this 
 pepper tree swinging in the moonlit winds its 
 leaves like dancing fairies. I have seen it 
 dripping with rains. I have seen a song spar- 
 row take a bath in its leaves by sitting on a 
 tiny limb and shaking the water from the limb 
 above — an improvised shower bath. I have 
 
38 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 seen it when it was glinting in the sunHght. I 
 have seen it with the street light shining on it. 
 I have seen it when, at evening time, it looked 
 like a Christmas tree. I have seen it swayed 
 to the ground under winter winds and I have 
 seen it when the winds before the dawn whis- 
 pered sweetly to its myriad leaves. I have seen 
 it when the winds of twilight were no less 
 gentle with it than the fading light itself. 
 
 I have seen the giant Eucalyptus swaying 
 and swinging and creaking in the winds of 
 winter, storm-tossed but staunch. I have seen 
 trees when they made me lift my shoulders a 
 bit straighter; when they made me feel more 
 like a man as I watched them battle with the 
 storms. 
 
 I have seen the old Cedars of Lebanon on the 
 coasts near Monterey, when I took off my hat 
 to them for their century-old battle with the 
 storms from the sea. I have seen them when 
 they had bent their sturdy backs so low 
 that their breasts were pressed to the ground, 
 but in the battle with the winds their feet were 
 planted like a giant's feet to fight, fight, fight 
 the storms that would break them. I have seen 
 the lonely pines far up the mountain sides at the 
 edge of cultivation and the timber lines fight- 
 ing the last battles against the heights. I have 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 39 
 
 seen old redwoods, fallen a thousand years, still 
 hard in their hearts and firm because they had 
 lived well their lives. I have seen giant 
 Sequoias — the Sphinx of the living world, a 
 Sphinx that was a sturdy giant when Christ 
 walked the earth ; I have seen them shake their 
 shaggy heads defiantly in the winds and storm 
 like some old bear of the forests. 
 
 I have been moved to awe and wonder at 
 these gigantic hosts of trees. Some of them I 
 have known intimately; some of them I have 
 known from afar. Some of them have made 
 me lift my soul toward the stars and have made 
 me look into the very eyes of God himself. I 
 have looked on a New England hillside in fall 
 time when the leaves of the trees were like a 
 great Oriental tapestry, myriad-hued with 
 crimson, gold, yellow, brown, blue, white; and 
 such beauty as would fill a soul with silent 
 weeping. 
 
 I have heard trees sing an eternal song of 
 beauty and wonder. I have seen them turned 
 into great yEolian harps by winter and spring 
 and summer winds. I have had my soul stirred 
 to its depths by the sweet music that the wind 
 makes in many trees; a music like the surf 
 song; a music like a harp soughing and sing- 
 ing. 
 
40 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 And this stirring of the soul has been 
 deepened by these tree beauties, but never is it 
 so stirred as when one looks back through the 
 dim centuries and the hope-laden years, down 
 through the nights and days, the twilights and 
 dawns of twenty centuries to a lonely, crude, 
 rough tree, hewn hurriedly, shot into a hole in 
 the ground, and a Saviour — my Saviour, the 
 world's Saviour — nailed to its rough bark and 
 its gaunt form. That tree of all trees is the 
 wonder tree of the world. 
 
 With the reverence of a tree 
 Lifting up its heart to Thee 
 As the evening shadows fall, 
 Let me lift my heart in all 
 The adoration of a prayer 
 For Thy goodness everywhere. 
 
 With the staunchness of a tree 
 
 Let me live so close to Thee 
 
 I may feel when night winds blow, 
 
 With their whispers soft and low, 
 
 Thou art talking tenderly, 
 
 Like a father unto me. 
 
 With the sureness of a tree 
 Let me live my life in Thee ; 
 Send my roots into Thy heart; 
 Of Thy very self a part; 
 Feel Thy strength pour into me 
 Like the currents of the sea. 
 
THE TREES OF THE BIBLE 41 
 
 With the calmness of a tree 
 Let me rest content with Thee, 
 In Thy rest may I find rest 
 As the sun sinks in the west; 
 In Thy wisdom may I know 
 It is best for me to grow. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 STORMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 THE black clouds hide the sky in hate; 
 the waves in anger roll and beat their 
 mighty bulk against the crouching, 
 rocky shore. They reach their clutching arms 
 to drag to death, and down, down into the 
 depths they mercilessly draw and drown the 
 helpless human victims of the storm. 
 
 The tempest beats and fear is on the sea. 
 The seagulls hide their heads among the lofty 
 cliffs, so far above the plunging waves that 
 they rest in peace. The tempest beats and 
 terror seizes on a mother's heart, for loved ones 
 range that boiling, roaring sea. The child is 
 filled with terror too, but finds a haven behind 
 its mother's skirts, just as the seagull finds a 
 haven of rest behind the sheltering rocks above 
 the storm. 
 
 The tempest beats; the gulls are safe; the 
 child has found a haven that drives its fear 
 away; but the mother ever has and ever still 
 shall face the storms of life and bear the brunt 
 of suffering, and go alone down into valleys 
 where no other one can go. But ever she may 
 
 42 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 43 
 
 hide behind the robes of God, the Lover of all 
 brave, true hearts who fight alone; and ever 
 she may mount on wings of love to hide her 
 soul amid the rocks of solitude where she may 
 brood the breed that have Eternity forever in 
 their hearts. 
 
 The far horizons of the deep are brooding 
 promises of storms to be. A flash of lightning, 
 far and low, and all pervasive, the lightning 
 from a storm onrushing, moving like the 
 mighty horsemen of the Apocalypse upon the 
 ocean's vast expanse — horsemen winged to 
 range the seas, who leave a path of pestilence 
 along their wake. 
 
 Little house beside the sea; 
 Little mother fearfully; 
 Little child upon your breast; 
 Rest, O rest thy soul in me ! 
 I will comfort ; I will keep : 
 I will guide and I will guard 
 Sailors tossing on the deep ; 
 Bring them safely back to thee ! 
 
 One quotation that cpmes to mind is that 
 wonderfully comforting thought from Mrs. 
 Browning : 
 
 And I smiled to think His greatness 
 
 Flowed around my incompleteness; 
 
 'Round my restlessness. His rest ! 
 
 And the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west. 
 
44 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Some of the truly great scenes of the Bible 
 are scenes connected with storms. The fury 
 of a storm always has subdued men of every 
 age and every nation and every clime. There 
 is something about a storm that makes man feel 
 his helplessness and his littleness; it displays 
 the strength of something outside of his con- 
 trol — the power that sweeps him away as if he 
 too like a mighty ship at sea amid the turbulent 
 typhoon were a chip of wood or a piece of straw. 
 
 There is never a year that somewhere in 
 the Middle West we do not see the strange 
 power of a storm manifested. I might draw 
 innumerable illustrations from the past, but I 
 speak only of a recent storm. It was in a 
 Middle-West town. Eyewitnesses tell of 
 various things that they saw, and all are fas- 
 cinating. They tell how, as they stood on the 
 platform of a little station, they saw black 
 clouds suddenly sweep over the sky; saw a 
 funnel-shaped cloud approaching the city, and 
 then heard a strange roar coming upon them. 
 They tell how this roar increased in volume as 
 the light faded and that when its maximum was 
 reached the entire town was in complete dark- 
 ness. 
 
 They tell of what they found after the storm 
 had passed. Huge box cars had been lifted up 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 45 
 
 by the storm as if they had been part of a 
 child's toy train and carried for several blocks. 
 A whole train, including the engine, was raised 
 bodily from the track. They tell of houses 
 being detached from their foundations, carried 
 a mile, and deposited on another lot intact. 
 Men and women sleeping in their beds were 
 picked up and carried several blocks and 
 dropped down without injury. 
 
 We are all familiar with the sense of awe 
 and power that is manifested in a storm. One 
 needs but to read a Hugo's story of the loosed 
 cannon on the deck of the storm battered ship, 
 or a Conrad's "The Typhoon," to catch the awe 
 and terror of storms at sea. I have a childhood 
 memory of a cyclone. I can remember the dark- 
 ness that settled over the earth. I can remember 
 my father quickly taking me up in his arms 
 and running with me. I can remember a wild 
 ride in a wagon and a hurried climbing down 
 into a cyclone-cellar in Kansas. After that all 
 I remember is the sense of danger and the 
 ominous atmosphere that hovered over all of 
 us. I can remember the darkness and the deso- 
 lation. 
 
 And where is one who having experienced 
 a storm at sea does not remember it, or one 
 who has not been impressed with descriptions 
 
46 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 of ocean storms in literature? Anyone who 
 has passed through a real storm at sea will 
 never forget it. He will never forget the roll- 
 ing and creaking of the ship, whether that ship 
 were large or small. It matters not to Old 
 Ocean how large ships are, or how well they 
 are built, or how strong they are. It is all the 
 same to the raging sea. She claps her huge 
 hands, raises her great wave arms aloft like a 
 mighty giantess, and the great water walls 
 close about the trembling vessel, fall upon it, 
 chaos envelops it, and it is crushed as if it 
 were an egg-shell. Or a storm might be 
 likened to a madman bound with chains, who 
 in his maniacal rage rises and breaks those 
 chains as if they were made of straw, and 
 shouts and mockingly laughs at those who 
 think they would bind him. Or, again, the 
 storm may display the irresistible force of the 
 runaway street car which swept down a street 
 in San Francisco. It ran into an automobile 
 and crushed it aside as if it had been a play- 
 thing ; then into another automobile it crashed, 
 dealing with it similarly. Next it collided with 
 a big army truck, crushing it, hurling it out of 
 its way and killing several people. All of the 
 frantic efforts of the motorman and the con- 
 ductor to end its mad race were unavailing. It 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 47 
 
 swept on and on, smashing and crushing every- 
 thing in its path, reducing its speed but the 
 fraction of a second when it struck the big 
 army truck. On it drove, plunging, crashing, 
 dashing on its way. Nor did it end its wild- 
 journey until it had reached the foot of the hill, 
 where, battered and bruised, it stopped of its 
 own accord. So is a storm. 
 
 Man has boasted of the fact that he has con- 
 quered nature. He tells how he has harnessed 
 the mountain streams, how he has conquered 
 the air; how he has taken Niagara and made 
 it the servant of his will, made it to run his 
 street cars and light his cities. He boasts that 
 he has in recent days even bridged the Atlantic 
 with his airships and his dirigibles. He shouts 
 with triumph over the fact that he has climbed 
 more than thirty thousand feet into the air. 
 He boasts of his big gun that shoots twenty-five 
 miles upward — ^until its shell is almost outside 
 of the earth's atmosphere. He boasts that he 
 has photographed the sun and mapped the 
 earth and surveyed the universe ; and yet when 
 a storm sweeps over the sea it plays with man's 
 dirigibles and his planes as if they were thistle- 
 down ; and it toys with his great Leviathans as 
 if they were frail barks of shingled wood ; and 
 it laughs to itself at man's puny efforts to 
 
48 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 harness nature. The storm is yerily that 
 "strong life that never knows harness," 
 
 But "men may come and men may go;" 
 great engineers may come and great engineers 
 may go. They build Panama Canals, they 
 build railroads through mighty Alaska's ice- 
 bound regions with marvelous conquering 
 power of mind and brawn. One of the most 
 marvelous miracles of construction that I have 
 ever heard about is that of the building of the 
 Alaska and Northern Railroad. It was built 
 for forty miles inland from Fairbanks. It was 
 built in a land where the weather never got 
 higher than thirty degrees below zero and 
 where the snow was always twenty-five to 
 thirty feet deep. In the first forty miles there 
 are sixty-seven bridges. 
 
 These same engineers even spanned a 
 glacier — Miles Glacier, in the Copper River 
 Railroad, The bridge that spanned this huge 
 glacier had to be fifteen hundred feet long. 
 There is a double turn in the river here and it 
 flows between the faces of two glaciers, the 
 Miles and the Childs Glaciers, both of them 
 "living" glaciers, a sheer three hundred feet 
 high in their mighty bulks. Each spring the 
 engineers knew that thousands of icebergs 
 would come battering down that river from the 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 49 
 
 glaciers and that their buttresses must with- 
 stand all of this. They had to erect a bridge 
 with four spans. 
 
 Two years they worked under the most diffi- 
 cult of zero weather conditions, with blizzards 
 blowing practically every minute of the time 
 they toiled. Great concrete piers were driven 
 fifty feet through the river bottom and 
 anchored. To these were added a row of 
 eighty-pound rails, set a foot apart all around 
 and the whole structure bound with concrete, 
 and above this great ice breakers were simi- 
 larly constructed. They knew before they 
 began the work that it would have to be done 
 in the wintertime, because of the fact that as 
 soon as the spring thaw began no false work 
 could stand against the tremendous pressure 
 of the icebergs that were continually breaking 
 loose from the glaciers and sweeping down, 
 borne forward by a twelve-mile-an-hour cur- 
 rent. 
 
 Hence the task of constructing the piers had 
 to be undertaken in the dead of winter. It was 
 bitter cold. Snow storms were continuous. 
 The piercing wind blew sixty to ninety miles an 
 hour and hurled the fine particles of snow into 
 the faces of the workmen like stones and 
 needles. 
 
50 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 When the last span was almost in place there 
 came an appalling moment. The false work, 
 which consisted of two thousand piles driven 
 forty feet into the bottom of the river, moved 
 suddenly fifteen inches. The ice — a solid sheet 
 — was borne on a twelve-mile current. Into 
 this ice the piles had been frozen solidly as a 
 rock. The spring break up had begun. The 
 ice cap lifted twenty feet above its winter bed 
 and began to move. 
 
 The false work was fifteen inches out of 
 plumb. Not to get it back meant that they 
 could not connect with the farther shore. The 
 engineers realized that at any minute the whole 
 thing would go out. The fight that was before 
 them they fully realized, but they started to 
 work. As the man who described this says: 
 
 "The scene which follows was like a great 
 moving picture. I wish that it might have 
 been filmed for posterity to see. 
 
 "Steam from every available engine was 
 turned on the ice from long pipes. Every man 
 in camp was set to work to cut away that seven- 
 foot thick layer of ice from the false work. At 
 last this was done. 
 
 "During that awful arctic day the men 
 worked eighteen hours without stopping. The 
 river rose twenty-one feet. But all during this 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 51 
 
 time with the steam pipes working on the ice 
 and the men cutting, the piles were kept free 
 while one hundred cross-pieces were unbolted. 
 
 "Then the shifting of that false work back 
 to plumb was begun. It was done inch by 
 inch. At first it was one inch a day. Then it 
 was two inches a day. Then three, and then 
 four inches a day. The melting and chopping 
 went on day and night during this time. One 
 minute's relaxing of vigilance would have 
 meant defeat. Anchorages were made up the 
 river in the ice to hold the false structure in 
 place while every man from the engineers 
 down went to work to finish that last four 
 hundred and fifty-foot span. Finally at mid- 
 night that great crowd of American workers 
 and engineers had the satisfaction of seeing 
 that great, last span settle down into its con- 
 crete bed to stay forever. The last bolt was 
 driven at midnight. One hour later the river 
 broke loose. In two seconds every pile of the 
 false structure was broken off from its forty- 
 foot bed and the whole thing was a mass of 
 twisted wood and wire and steel. But the river 
 had been vanquished. It had lost the fight by 
 a single hour !" 
 
 I have seldom read or heard of such a 
 triumph of man over the forces of nature, not 
 
52 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 even in the story of the Panama Canal; but 
 even as I read this story I am remembering 
 that man's ships and his airplanes and his 
 dirigibles are still but the playthings of the 
 storms. Man may conquer ice and river and 
 waterfall, and he may connect ocean with ocean 
 by his mighty canal, severing a continent, and 
 in that severing connecting a world, defying 
 sands and leveling mountains; but when he 
 faces a storm, with all his engineering genius 
 and with all his mighty power, he is helpless — 
 and he knows it. 
 
 And so it shall ever be with man. God lets 
 him go just so far, and God wants him to go 
 Ijust so far. But God is still Master. There is 
 only one instance on record when a storm was 
 quieted, and that was on the Sea of Galilee, and 
 there was a group of disciples in the boat with 
 Jesus when the storm arose and the waves beat 
 so high that it frightened those who were with 
 him, and he arose and "rebuked the waves" 
 and subdued the storm. And men, wondering, 
 said, "What manner of man is this, that even 
 the winds and the sea obey him ?" 
 
 Old Testament Storms 
 
 The Old Testament writers used the storms 
 as they used the birds and rivers and moun- 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 53 
 
 tains and deserts of the Bible to make vivid 
 and clear and emphatic their teachings. Some 
 of the most marvelous descriptions of storms 
 that are written anywhere on earth are the 
 descriptions of storms that are found in the 
 drama of Job and in the Psalms. 
 
 Psalm 29 is perhaps the most perfect picture 
 of a great storm that ever was written. One 
 sees an Oriental tempest in all of its fury and 
 all of its glory. You see it from the beginning 
 to the end. You can see the black clouds and 
 the lightning, and hear the roll of thunder. 
 You can see the winds sweep through the forest 
 of trees and watch them toppling before the 
 mighty winds. 
 
 I was in the great redwood forests a while 
 ago up in Humboldt County, California, and 
 there I saw giant redwoods by the hundreds 
 lying crossing each other, toppled over against 
 each other like men lying on a battlefield, with 
 their huge forms broken, twisted, defeated. I 
 was horrified at the sight. They were such 
 magnificent giants. They had stood for thou- 
 sands of years. It did not seem any more 
 possible for one of them to be blown over than 
 that Yosemite's El Capitan should go down in 
 a storm. But there they were — fallen giants. 
 
 I said, "What did it?" 
 
54 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 The reply was, "The storms of last winter." 
 
 Then I remembered the storm in this great 
 psalm, how it made the trees of Lebanon and 
 Hermon shake and tremble. One even sees the 
 poor animals of the forests terrorized and flee- 
 ing for safety, trembling for their young. 
 
 "Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto 
 the Lord glory and strength. 
 
 "Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his 
 name ; worship the Lord in the beauty of holi- 
 ness. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters 
 [storm]: the God of glory thundereth: the 
 Lord is upon many waters. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord is powerful; the 
 voice of the Lord is full of majesty. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars 
 [winds] ; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of 
 Lebanon. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord divideth the flames 
 of fire [lightning]. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord shaketh [thunder] 
 the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilder- 
 ness of Kadesh. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord sitteth upon the 
 flood; vea, the Lord sitteth King forever." 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 55 
 
 But even in this great and marvelous descrip- 
 tion the poet is not picturing the storm just for 
 the sake of picturing a storm, but he is painting 
 this vivid picture with a great purpose. It is to 
 show that God reigns even above that mighty 
 storm; that God is still Master even of this 
 mighty force; that God is not fearful; that he 
 is the Maker of the winds and the storms, and 
 that they obey his will. Just as in the storm on 
 the sea when he permitted his Son Jesus to 
 show the world that he was Master of the 
 storms, so all through this scene of a storm the 
 voice of the psalmist cries that "The Voice of 
 the Lord" was over it all. This sentence is 
 repeated from time to time with an insistency 
 that makes us know that David meant this 
 storm description for no other reason than to 
 make the great truth sink home to human 
 hearts that this was God's storm. 
 
 As one writer says, the first two verses of this 
 storm psalm and the last two verses are framed 
 to inclose the picture of the storm. They speak 
 of peace and quiet. It is a teaching that God 
 will bring peace and quiet into human hearts 
 after the storms of life have buffeted human 
 lives about. And who that has known of this 
 stirring, soul-satisfying and everlasting hope 
 has not found it blessedly true ? 
 
56 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Elijah's Storm and Its Teaching 
 
 We used to call it "Elijah's storm" wHen I 
 was a boy. That was the way a class of 
 Sunday-school boys thought of it. Somehow 
 one teacher with an imagination had made that 
 one great story and storm real to us. We could 
 see the strong wind that rent the mountains. 
 We could feel the earthquake that followed it. 
 We could see the fire that swept over the land 
 following the storm and earthquake. We often 
 decided during the discussions that always fol- 
 lowed this story that lightning which came 
 during the storm had started the fire that 
 Elijah saw from the mouth of the cave where 
 he had sought shelter. Then when the San 
 Francisco earthquake startled the world, with 
 the awful fire that followed it, a boy's interpre- 
 tation of this story would give him a right to 
 believe that his biblical interpretation was 
 right. 
 
 In fact, this whole section of Kings is full of 
 storms. There are few varieties of storm that 
 are left out. First, there is in the eighth chap- 
 ter, toward the close, that fascinating contest 
 to see if Baal or Jehovah will answer and the 
 final culmination in "the sound of abundance 
 of rain." 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 57 
 
 Then Elijah went to the top of Mount Carmel 
 and watched the skies and saw the cloud that 
 was "no larger than a man's hand" and which 
 grew and grew in size until it covered the 
 heavens, and "It came to pass in the mean- 
 while, that the heaven was black with clouds 
 and wind, and there was a great rain." But 
 what more vivid description of storm succeed- 
 ing storm — storm of the clouds, and then storm 
 of the earth, and then storm of fire — than that 
 seen by Elijah from the mouth of the cave? — 
 "And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great 
 and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake 
 in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the 
 Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind 
 an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the 
 earthquake : and after the earthquake a fire ; but 
 the Lord was not in the fire : and after the fire 
 a still small voice." 
 
 And what was the spiritual lesson that God 
 was trying to teach through this vivid storm 
 description, these startling figures of speech? 
 God was trying to teach the great truth that 
 ofttimes he has to subdue people with storms 
 of anguish and suffering, and even of death, 
 before they will be quiet in their souls and listen 
 to him. There is no preacher who has not 
 learned that folks are always more susceptible 
 
58 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 to spiritual things after the storm of death has 
 passed. It is not that they are scared. It is 
 that they have stopped to think. This life is so 
 full of a "number of things" that we do not 
 pause to think. When we do we see things 
 clearly, we get in touch with the infinite things 
 and the infinite spiritual powers that are every- 
 where about us for our use. 
 
 All of this series of storm scenes was but to 
 lead up to the "still small voice." When the 
 architect of the Fine Arts Palace designed the 
 colonnades he designed them with a purpose, 
 and that purpose was to subdue the people 
 before they entered the sacred halls of high art. 
 They had been in the great palaces of 
 machinery and along the avenues where pop- 
 corn and ice-cream cones were cried. They 
 had watched the airship loop the loop. They 
 were in no mood to see beautiful pictures, so 
 he built the colonnades, like some ancient 
 Grecian scene of beauty. Everybody had to 
 pass through these colonnades to get to the pic- 
 tures. Before they were through they were 
 subdued. And so God used the storm to subdue 
 Elijah before he spoke to him. When Elijah 
 had been brought to his knees by the power and 
 the wonder, then God spoke in a still small 
 voice. 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 59 
 
 Yes, and God wanted to teach the great 
 spiritual truth that he does not always speak 
 through the tumbling, turbulent rivers and 
 brooks, but often through the great easy-flow- 
 ing, smooth-running, quietly going streams. 
 God doesn't make much noise when he talks 
 the eternal truths. It is nearly always in "the 
 still small voice." But, whatever the lesson, it 
 is perfectly clear that God was talking through 
 a storm, and it is perfectly clear that Elijah, 
 the great prophet, wanted to pass the truth on 
 through that medium of speech to humanity 
 everywhere. 
 
 Job's Storm 
 
 Job's storm was a whirlwind: "Then the 
 Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind." 
 
 And those who know the great drama of Job 
 know that no stage setting save that of a storm 
 would have been complete after all this play of 
 dialogue and words and great fundamental 
 human passions and hopes and triumphs. 
 
 The great drama was drawing to its close. 
 The climax was near. The acute human prob- 
 lems of Job were evidently impossible of solu- 
 tion. But still Job trusted in his God, and still 
 he cried out, "Though he slay me, yet will I 
 trust him." 
 
6o OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 "The undying fire" was still smoldering in 
 Job's breast. The arguments seemed to be all 
 against him. He seemed defeated by his fault- 
 finding friends. The preponderance of evi- 
 dence seemed to weigh him down, but still he 
 trusted. Then God's voice came to him in the 
 whirlwind, and it spoke peace to his troubled 
 soul. 
 
 Dr. Knudson says, "Job's problems were 
 never solved; they just disappeared as God 
 spoke out of the whirlwind." And that is often 
 the way of life, and no doubt God meant to 
 teach this in his great drama. Our problems 
 are not always solved by us, or for us, but they 
 disappear, which is just as well for us and for 
 the world. The thing is pragmatic. It works. 
 They disappear. The thing works. God makes 
 our sorrows to dissipate. They are no more. 
 He speaks to us out of the whirlwinds of our 
 passions, our hates, our jealousies, our suffer- 
 ings, our weaknesses, our fits of anger, our 
 hopelessness, and somehow his voice makes 
 everything right. It is like hearing the voice 
 of love in the night. 
 
 A little girl imagines all sorts of goblins and 
 bugaboos and strange monsters in the night 
 hours. Her little imagination can people a 
 sleeping-porch with more wild animals than the 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 6i 
 
 Zoo of New York ever owned. She can crowd 
 them all into a ten-foot sleeping porch. She 
 can, with her imagination at night, see more 
 beasts with big teeth and horns walk up the 
 gang plank of half-sleep and in through an 
 open window than walked into the ark before 
 the flood. She can see more strange ghosts 
 and weird creatures than a Kipling's or a Poe's 
 imagination working at top speed for a lifetime 
 can conjure up. Her little voice will cry out in 
 terror, startling a sleeping daddy and mother 
 near at hand, who are lying utterly unconscious 
 of all the danger they are in, utterly uncon- 
 scious of the hordes of dreadful beasts that are 
 pouring into that sleeping porch, making the 
 night hideous with their snarls and their growl- 
 ings and their gnashing of teeth, until they 
 hear a little terrified voice, crying, "Daddy, 
 daddy ! Mother, mother !" 
 
 The daddy sits up in bed a bit startled him- 
 self, and hears of the wild animals that are on 
 the porch, and he speaks a quiet word of love 
 and encouragement to a troubled little soul; 
 and in a flash the daddy's voice drives all the 
 wild animals away for good. They disappear 
 as if his voice were a magic wand. They slink 
 away to their lairs without harming the little 
 girl ; and all is peace and quiet, and a little child 
 
62 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 dreams in peace and a little heart is stilled of 
 its fear. Just a daddy's voice dissipates the 
 fear and the troubles go away; and the problem 
 is solved. And so out of the whirlwind God's 
 voice spoke peace to Job's troubled soul. 
 
 Other Storm Figures 
 
 There is that beautiful, confidence-produc- 
 ing, cheering word of David the poet to us, and 
 we hear him sing a new hope that God "maketh 
 the storm a calm." And so hereafter, when our 
 hearts are torn with the storm of anger, fear, 
 !jealousy, let God make of our storm a calm. 
 
 Proverbs warns us that "fear cometh as a 
 storm." 
 
 And we know that it does. Sometimes fear 
 will sweep over us like the chilly blasts before 
 a winter storm and it will leave us helpless. 
 Those of us who dealt with many people and 
 many homes during the influenza epidemic will 
 remember that fear made hundreds of people 
 more susceptible to the disease that was stalk- 
 ing like a black specter in our midst. "Fear 
 Kills More Folks Than Flu" was the theme of 
 a sermon that the writer preached at that time, 
 trying to show that the worst disease-breeding 
 ground in the world was a soul filled with fear. 
 God never meant for his children to be afraid. 
 
STORMS OF THE BIBLE 63 
 
 "Let not your hearts be troubled" is a message 
 that he sends us a hundred times in his Book. 
 
 But if fear does come "like a storm," he 
 assures us through Isaiah that there is in 
 Jehovah "A covert from the storm," and in 
 another part of Isaiah he says it in other 
 words — "a refuge from the storm." 
 
 Jehovah makes it clear in many a figure of 
 speech through the vehicle of a storm that he 
 will punish sin and sinning nations (particu- 
 larly sinning nations) with a storm; that he 
 will sweep them away as with a tempest. 
 Typical of all of these many figures so used is 
 that of Isaiah, chapter twenty-nine, verse six: 
 "Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with 
 thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, 
 with storm and tempest, and the flame of a 
 devouring fire." And whoever believes that 
 this does not happen needs but to try the way 
 of sin. 
 
 I know of a home now where sin has entered. 
 And because I know that, I can make a 
 prophecy which will be fulfilled within my own 
 day that the one who is guilty of the sin will 
 suffer grievously before the story has come to 
 its last chapter. In the last chapter, like Tito 
 of Romola, there will be a pair of bony fingers 
 clutching at a sleek, fat throat and a lifeless 
 
64 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 body and a lifeless, burned-out soul will lie on 
 the banks of the Arno river to be the food of 
 vultures. That's why God says that sinning 
 men and sinning cities will look as if a storm of 
 earthquake and fire has swept over them. This 
 figure is used frequently, but it is everlastingly 
 true. 
 
 Did you see San Francisco after the fire and 
 earthquake? Did you see Galveston after the 
 tidal wave? Did you see Chicago after the 
 fire? Did you see Baltimore after the great 
 fire ? Did you see Constantinople after fire had 
 swept it almost from the face of the earth ? Did 
 you see France after the war ? That's what a 
 human soul looks like after sin has burned its 
 soul away. Sin leaves a human being looking 
 like the burned, dried, charred flesh of one who 
 has met death in a flame of fire. That's what 
 sin does to a soul and to a nation. 
 
 But in the same book of Isaiah, in the twenty- 
 fifth chapter, God also promises his nation and 
 his people and every human soul that will come 
 to him that he will be a stronghold to them: 
 "For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a 
 strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge 
 from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when 
 the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm 
 against the wall." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 NO wonder that the writers of the Bible 
 — and, indeed, writers the world over 
 and the centuries through — ^have 
 used the mountains as some of their most tell- 
 ing and striking figures of speech. 
 
 What thing about us is so stable, so reliable, 
 so eternal as the mountains, the "mothers of 
 rivers" ? The similes that are commonly used 
 by preachers and writers with mountains as the 
 comparison are enough to fill a page of this 
 chapter, and every one of them will be found in 
 the Bible. They are : 
 
 As high as the mountains. 
 
 As majestic as the mountains. 
 
 As staunch as the mountains. 
 
 As reliable as the mountains. 
 
 As everlasting as the mountains. 
 
 As stable as the mountains. 
 
 As true as the mountains. 
 
 As near to God as the mountains. 
 
 As godlike as the mountains. 
 
 As abundant as the mountains. 
 65 
 
66 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 As rugged as the mountains. 
 
 As steep as the mountains. 
 
 As fertile as the mountains. 
 
 As friendly as the mountains. 
 
 As life-giving as the mountains. 
 
 As faithful as the mountains. 
 
 And so it goes. Figures of speech to teacH 
 
 great spiritual truths with the mountains as 
 
 backgrounds are common in the Bible ; common 
 
 in the sense of occurring frequently, but 
 
 wonderfully uncommon in their beauty and 
 
 depth of meaning. 
 
 "The lonely sunsets flare forlorn 
 
 Down valleys dreadly desolate; 
 The mighty mountains soar in scorn. 
 As still as death, as stern as fate! 
 
 "The lonely sunsets flame and die; 
 The giant valleys gulp the night; 
 The monster mountains scrape the sky; 
 The eager stars are diamond bright." 
 
 {The Spell of the Yukon.) 
 
 What a thrilling sight it is to see God put the 
 mountains to sleep at night! Watch him 
 spread, first, a glorious crimson blanket over 
 them, and then over this crimson blanket a 
 purple robe as befits the slumbers of a king. 
 Then often, when God thinks the mountains 
 will be too chilly, in between the royal robe of 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 67 
 
 purple and the crimson blanket he slips a lighter 
 robe of pink and salmon color. Then when he 
 has the little hills, and the great old pines, and 
 the tiny bushes, and the flowers and grasses, 
 and the birds in their nests, and the myriad 
 baby leaves tucked in for the night, God sings 
 them to sleep with his running streams and his 
 winds whispering in the leaves, and soughing 
 through the valleys. And as you watch this 
 gentle putting of the mountains to sleep, you 
 cannot tell which is the more beautiful, tender- 
 ness of the God of the mountains and of the 
 little hills or the twilight hills themselves. It is 
 a wonderful privilege to watch the mountains 
 put to bed at twilight. 
 
 And then to see God awaken the mountains 
 is no small privilege. First he sends the winds 
 before the dawn and with them the heralds of 
 faint light that tell of the coming of the groom 
 of the morning. It is as though God would 
 awaken the mountains as gently as he put them 
 to sleep. Nature is gentle at times. It is as a 
 mother who awakens her child. She does not 
 go into the rooifn yelling and clamoring, and 
 shouting to awaken the child. She does not 
 discharge a gun nor drop a book. She does not 
 want to awaken it too abruptly. She is sweetly 
 gentle about it, and whispers its name like a 
 
68 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 morning prayer: "Betty — Betty — Baby dear — 
 has mother got a baby here?" And so God 
 awakens the mountains and the grasses and the 
 little hills — so gently: first, the winds before 
 the dawn — and how softly they blow! — so 
 softly that were you awake you could barely 
 feel them on your cheeks. But it is a stirring 
 wind; this wind before the dawn, and the 
 mountain begins to awake to consciousness. 
 Then God sends with sudden wondrous har- 
 mony a chorus of bird songs, louder than the 
 wind before the dawn, and with it a soft mantle 
 of light across the eastern hills. He has now 
 touched the cheeks of the sleeping mountains 
 and is shaking his children gently. The trees 
 begin to sway in the wind, and a pale light slips 
 in through the windows of the sky. 
 
 And now, quietly, unobtrusively — alifiost 
 before we know it, the dawn has come, and the 
 bird chorus has swelled to fullest volume. The 
 winds are sweeping through the pines, the 
 mountains are shouting with joy at a new day, 
 and God is glad. His children are awake and 
 ready to be fed, and ready for work, and ready 
 for play. 
 
 Poets and artists and prophets have always 
 loved the mountains. Jesus Christ, the greatest 
 Poet and Artist and Prophet of all times, found 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 69 
 
 a place to rest and pray high up on the moun- 
 tains of Judaea. 
 
 Bret Harte was a lover of his Rocky Moun- 
 tains and Joaquin Miller sings his "Songs of 
 the Sierras" with a love and charm that makes 
 them our mountains also. Whittier loved the 
 White Mountains of New England, while 
 Irving lived among and immortalized the roll- 
 ing mountain side of the beautiful Selkirks. 
 Angelo saw his first visions of marble glories 
 as he gloried in the far-off beauties of the 
 majestic Alps, and Robert Service has sung us 
 the songs of Alaskan peaks and glaciers. John 
 Muir makes us live with him on old White 
 Shasta's snow-blanketed slopes, or roam with 
 him Yosemite's precipitous sides, or scale her 
 El Capitan and her Half Domes, or journey 
 with him up Ranier's ice-bound pathways. And 
 we of lesser fame have our mountains and love 
 them. 
 
 I wandered as a boy over the Allegheny 
 Mountains, and sang as a boy that song which 
 thrills all men born in that State whose motto 
 is "Mountaineers are always free," the beauti- 
 ful melody of "Those West Virginia Hills." 
 But in recent years mine has been the glory of 
 having as boon companion the Sierras; mine 
 has been the glory of living within sight and 
 
70 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 sound of Mount Shasta, "The noblest Roman 
 of them all." I have watched Mount Shasta 
 belch its streams of crystal snow-born water 
 out across the valleys of California. I have 
 heard its thundering avalanches and have 
 watched the slow creeping of its glaciers. I 
 have seen it fling its snow-banners to the winds 
 of winter and I have seen it through the 
 shadows of nighttime. I have watched a 
 crimson sunset further glorify its immaculate 
 beauty, and I have seen storm clouds scowling 
 about its ever-dominant head. I have watched 
 it go to sleep at night and awaken in the morn- 
 ing. 
 
 The world over men turn their eyes and 
 hearts mountainward. One who has traveled 
 over the Orient will remember a common sight: 
 that of the inevitable "pilgrim" on his way, 
 across a whole nation, by foot, begging his 
 living, because of a vow he has made that he 
 will ascend Fujiyama's beauteous and imposing 
 peak. 
 
 Fujiyama looms up in the spiritual life of the 
 Japanese just as it rises in its snow-crowned 
 symmetry above the otherwise level stretches of 
 Japan. To the Japanese this great mountain is 
 a thing to revere, a thing to pray to, a thing to 
 bow down before, a thing to worship. And 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 71 
 
 even to the casual traveler Fujiyama, rising, 
 as it does, from a level expanse, fills one with 
 awe and wonderment. 
 
 And just as Fujiyama stands out as one oi 
 the great shrines of the Orient so does old 
 Mount Taishan, China. Here for thirty cen- 
 turies men have been worshiping. Here Con- 
 fucius himself climbed six thousand steps to 
 Taishan's mile-high crest where the quaint 
 temples and towers and monoliths rear their 
 heads and send the music of their innumerable 
 bells tinkling in the winds. 
 
 Here six thousand granite steps have been 
 engineered, so far back in the dim past that the 
 Chinese cannot tell who performed this 
 gigantic task. Up these six thousand granite 
 steps hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every 
 year, from all over the great nation, make their 
 way with devout hearts, to pay their vows made 
 during the years. Mothers come here who 
 have made a vow that if they come safely 
 through the voyage of birth, they will climb 
 Taishan. Business men who have prospered 
 during the year climb Taishan to pay their 
 ivows of gratitude. From its sacred summit one 
 may sight the far off ocean beauty with the 
 level plains lying in grace and beauty between. 
 Taishan is called "the oldest worshiping place 
 
72 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 on earth." One has a sense of reverence as he 
 stands on its wind-swept summit. For long 
 before Moses shook the bondage of Egypt 
 from his soul, centuries before Isaiah lived and 
 dreamed and died; before Christ was awaited; 
 before Europe had a civilzation at all; before 
 America saw its first Indians, men were 
 worshiping on Taishan's peaks. 
 
 "I have stood in some mighty mouthed hollow 
 Plumb full of hush to the brim; 
 I have watched the big husky sun wallow 
 In crimson and gold, and grow dim, 
 Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming 
 And the stars tumbled out neck and crop, 
 And I thought that I surely was dreaming 
 With the peace of the world piled on top." 
 
 {The Spell of the Yukon.\ 
 
 And not only do the poets, painters, prophets 
 and preachers outside the sacred precincts of 
 the Bible love the mountains and use them as 
 mediums of thought conveyance, but the Book 
 itself is full of mountains. 
 
 Mountains of the Bible 
 
 There are three scientific explanations for 
 the origin of mountains, and we find all three 
 of these explanations accounting for the moun- 
 tains in biblical lands as well as in our own 
 great country. The first is mountains by eleva- 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 73 
 
 tion; the second is mountains by erosion; the 
 third is mountains by accumulation. Let us 
 consider first the theory of origin by elevation: 
 Many mountains and many mountain ranges 
 owe their origin to upheavals from beneath 
 that have come during the geological periods, 
 when the forces of underworld nature were, 
 like a huge elephant humping its coast-long 
 back, bulging the surface of the earth high into 
 the air. Thus came our Rocky Mountains and 
 our high Sierras ; and if you want a beautiful 
 scientific narrative of how this came about, 
 with a poetic background, read Edwin Mark- 
 ham's California the Wonderful. In addition 
 to our Western mountains are the Scandina- 
 vian and Grampian ranges, the ranges of 
 North Wales, those of Bavaria, and the biblical 
 Sinaitic group beween the Gulfs of Suez and 
 Akaba. The Alps and the Pyrenees were also 
 a part of the world's upheaval. 
 
 The second classification is origin by erosion. 
 Many mountains which stand off by them- 
 selves, and mountain ranges running for thou- 
 sands of miles owe their origin to the erosion 
 of the lands around them. This is true of our 
 own ranges of the Colorado in North America, 
 where by rains and the chisel of the Colorado 
 River not only a great mountain range was cut 
 
74 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 out and the plateaus leveled, but a beautiful 
 Grand Canyon was left over in the making. A 
 range called the Jura in Switzerland came 
 about in this way, as did a range in South 
 Wales. 
 
 The mountains in biblical lands — Upper 
 Egypt, Edom, Moab, southern Judea — the 
 Lebanon range, with the dome-like Mount 
 Hermon, which every winter hoards its snows 
 to pour into beautiful Galilee — all owe their 
 origin to erosion of the tablelands about them, 
 leaving these ranges and single lone mountains 
 standing out by themselves. Thus came Mount 
 Hor where Aaron died. 
 
 The third and last theory is that of mountains 
 by accumulation. What a marvelous story the 
 story of accumulation tells ! It might be called 
 the snowball method. Thousands of cities have 
 literally been buried by accumulation. In some 
 places we see four and five cities on top of each 
 other, which through the succeeding centuries 
 have been buried by accumulation. It has 
 seemed almost impossible, but we who live close 
 neighbors to sand dunes know that it is entirely 
 within reason. If you don't believe it, go out 
 on the dunes and see how in one sand storm a 
 fence and a house will be buried almost over- 
 night. 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 75 
 
 But accumulative mountains usually come by 
 the eruption of volcanoes, either out of the sea 
 or on the land. These belching holes throw out 
 millions of tons of debris, which through the 
 aeons piles itself up into a mighty mountain. 
 
 The Auvergnes in Central France were 
 formed in this manner ; Vesuvius and Etna, two 
 great isolated mountains, were formed in this 
 accumulative manner. 
 
 In the region east of the Upper Jordan, called 
 in the New Testament Trachonitis, there are 
 several extinct volcanic cones rising above the 
 surface of the plains. Still further east in 
 Bashan a grand range of volcanic mountains 
 dominates this wild land. In Central Arabia is 
 another range thus formed. Not far from the 
 famous Mohammedan Mecca and Medina are 
 such mountains, although they were probably 
 thrown up even before the event of man ajjd the 
 story of the flood. 
 
 Biblical References to Mountains 
 
 "A god's mountain," indicating greatness or 
 majesty — so Mount Horeb and Sinai were 
 called, not only because they were dignified, but 
 also because they had biblical chapters of the 
 great drama of religion enacted on their high- 
 flung peaks that have made them memorable. 
 
76 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Both "The Mount of the Congregation" and 
 "The Mount of AssembHng" refer to the 
 dwelling place of the gods and to places where 
 the Israelites met to worship. 
 
 Among the figures of speech which appear in 
 the Bible in reference to mountains are those in 
 which the mountains are said to "cover the 
 guilty from God's face," to "leap in praise of 
 Jehovah," to "witness his dealings with his 
 people." They also are referred to as hiding 
 places, hunting and grazing grounds for cattle 
 and sheep, and as beacon stations. 
 
 Some of the most memorable and far-reach- 
 ing scenes of the Bible were enacted on moun- 
 tains. Mount Moriah, a single and lonely 
 elevated summit among the hills of Palestine 
 was the scene of Abraham's intended sacrifice 
 of his son. Here the knife was lifted ; here the 
 prayer was uttered; here a father heart was 
 tested supremely, and here a lover of God 
 triumphed. Mount Sinai is a name to conjure 
 with in biblical history and great scenes and 
 gigantic moments. Mount Hor, the scene of 
 Aaron's death, shall be forever sacred to the 
 lover of Holy Writ. The Mount of Olives, over- 
 looking Jerusalem the Golden, memorable for 
 many incidents of the great story of Christ 
 (almost as significant an out-of-doors spot as 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE ^^ 
 
 the shores of blue Galilee), is most memorable 
 because it was from this mountain and down 
 its sides that Jesus walked on the morning of 
 his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. 
 
 The mount of transfiguration is in dispute as 
 to its exact location. Most authorities, how- 
 ever, agree that it was on Mount Hermon. 
 What more appropriate spot for this last great 
 scene? There it stands overlooking the Lake 
 of Galilee, whose level, as we have seen, each 
 spring is raised by pouring its melting snows 
 into the basin. What more appropriate spot 
 for this great event than that peak, nine 
 thousand feet high, which could easily have 
 been reached in less than a week from Caesarea 
 Philippi ? The greatest enunciations, including 
 the Beatitudes, were given on mountains. 
 "Mountain-top experiences" has come to be a 
 part of the very religious phraseology of our 
 belief. 
 
 Truths Taught by the Mountains 
 
 Just as has been the case in every outstand- 
 ing feature of natural life, the writers of the 
 Bible used the mountains to teach their great 
 truths. They recognized the fact first, that 
 mountains inspire worship. Fuji-san, the great 
 mountain of Japan, which has been mentioned. 
 
78 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 is the worshiping place of the entire Japanese 
 empire. No loyal Japanese ever passes that 
 sacred mass of mountain greatness without 
 making his reverent obeisance. One Christmas 
 Eve, with a group of Methodists I was at Angel 
 Island, San Francisco. We were trying to 
 make a group of Japanese immigrants, which 
 included a group of Geisha girls, happy on that 
 evening of all evenings. We showed them sev- 
 eral reels of motion pictures, but got no re- 
 sponse from them. They were like little brown 
 imitations of the Sphinx, as far as any joy on 
 their faces showed. Then we showed on the 
 screen a picture of Fuji. There was instant 
 response. Little peals of joyous laughter came 
 from those Geisha girls. There was a sudden 
 commotion, and much to our surprise in a 
 twinkling they were bowing to their knees 
 before that great mountain. 
 
 On the summit of Shasta's peak there is a 
 little protected box in which some reverent soul 
 has placed a Bible, and here those who worship 
 God read a bit of his book, and pray on that 
 great summit. 
 
 Bishop Quayle says that they "suggest 
 eternity" and he further adds, "Compared with 
 Mount Tacoma, the immortal Sphinx is but a 
 child in years." 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 79 
 
 Mountains are so high that they seem natu- 
 rally to lift us nearer to God, and they also 
 take us further away from the sordidness of the 
 world, away from the "mud and scum of 
 things," up into the clean air, and the purity 
 and sweetness where stars shine and God is. 
 
 Mountains also suggest steadfastness. In 
 the midst of this turbulent age, with the world 
 full of restlessness and uneasiness, it is good to 
 look unto the hills. 
 
 *T will lift up mine eyes unto the hills :' from 
 whence cometh my help." 
 
 The mountains seem to be about the only 
 stable, steadfast things on earth, and they give 
 us new strength when we live in their midst 
 during these restless years. 
 
 I lived within sight of Mount Tamalpais for 
 three years in San Francisco. I saw it the first 
 thing in the morning and the last thing at night. 
 I watched the golden glory of the Golden Gate 
 flood its brown sides, and watched the white 
 fog of a new morning bathe its rugged outlines. 
 
 I have seen great floods of fog pour in from 
 off the Pacific Ocean and completely hide its 
 rugged form, but I have never at any time 
 doubted that, when the fog rolled away or was 
 
 * Revised Version, "mountains." 
 
8o OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 dissipated by the sun, my old faithful friend 
 still would be there. It always was. It was 
 steadfast. 
 
 San Francisco was shaken to dust by the 
 great earthquake and then the dust went up in 
 ashes, but old Tamalpais was undisturbed by 
 that terrible calamity. There it stood faithful, 
 steadfast, as a true friend stands by one when 
 trouble comes. Such are unmoved. 
 
 So may our friends be ; so may our ideals be ; 
 so may our hope in eternity be; so may our 
 faith in God be ; so may our belief in good and 
 in Jesus Christ be; so may our loyalty to the 
 church be, and our love for our home and our 
 loved ones ; so may our belief in things high and 
 holy; so may the staunchness of our lives be; 
 as steadfast and as faithful as the mountains. 
 
 They suggest many other things : they sug- 
 gest abundance, shelter; they are the "mothers 
 of rivers" ; they are the hope of the valleys and 
 of humanity; they are the beacon lights of the 
 world ; they are the guideposts of the mariners 
 coming in from sea, as Miller says; they are 
 the test of all faith; but, more than all other 
 things, they suggest steadfastness and worship. 
 These two stand out like two great twin peaks 
 themselves in a glorious range of mountains, 
 these two and none other; these two, snow- 
 
MOUNTAINS OF THE BIBLE 8i 
 
 crowned and gleaming in the sunlight of 
 eternity : worship and steadfastness. 
 
 And at last the hope of the world gleams 
 from a mountain top, where Calvary's cross 
 arises with its form of hope through the cen- 
 turies. I have seen Mount Shasta all day long 
 through the distance and near at hand, and it 
 has been a glorious sight. I have seen Mount 
 McGregor, that last resting place of General 
 Grant, and one Sunday morning I climbed to 
 its peak, and standing on the place where Grant 
 used to stand to look out over the valley of the 
 beautiful Hudson, we took out our Book of 
 books and read the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 there we worshiped God. We had climbed to 
 the top of Mount McGregor, and in that climb 
 we had climbed nearer to God. 
 
 But, higher than all of these, more beautiful, 
 more crowned with the light of a great hope, 
 more steadfast, from whose breast flow more 
 streams of mercy and healing than flow from 
 Shasta ; although it is only a mere hill, growing 
 sweeter and sweeter each day, growing higher 
 and mightier as the centuries roll on, more 
 majestic, more filled with an eternal hope, is 
 Mount Calvary, on whose lonely top still 
 stands in the heart of the world the lonely cross 
 of Jesus. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 SINCE the mountains are said to be the 
 "mothers of rivers," it is well to con- 
 sider in this chapter the rivers of the 
 Bible and the great spiritual lessons that the 
 biblical writers intended to teach by reference 
 to them. Some one has said that all great 
 writers have been influenced by three things, 
 namely, the epoch in which they lived, their 
 race, and their physical surroundings ; and cer- 
 tainly among the physical surroundings of the 
 Bible the rivers played no small part. Nearly 
 every writer at some time tries to picture God 
 as speaking through a river, as does Isaiah 
 when he says, "I will extend peace to her like 
 a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a 
 flowing stream" (Isa. 66. 12). This great 
 figure of speech that Isaiah uses in trying to 
 impress the people with whom he is speaking is 
 a natural figure of speech. If there is any one 
 thing that to me expresses a sense of quiet and 
 peace, it is a great, broad river flowing serenely 
 between hills and meadows to its inevitable 
 destination, the ocean. 
 
 82 
 
w 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 83 
 
 There is nothing uncertain about a river. It 
 knows what it is about, and it knows where it 
 is going. It has been there before. It has been 
 there almost as often as a motorman has been 
 over the route that he has been running for 
 years. The drops of water that go to make up 
 this great, broad river have traveled this route 
 from the beginning of time. Blessed is the man 
 who knows where he is going, in whom is no 
 uncertainty. 
 
 It is a contented body, a river. It does not 
 allow itself to become restless and uncertain 
 and disturbed and worried and flustrated. It 
 goes serenely on, no matter what happens. If 
 a dam gets in its way it quietly seeks an outlet 
 along some other route. If a bowlder thrusts 
 itself up to impede the progress of a river, that 
 river calmly and without much ado or fret, 
 laughs to itself — and some say that the splash- 
 ing is the way a river has of laughing — and 
 slips serenely around that bowlder on its blessed 
 and certain way. 
 
 Happy are the men and women who have 
 learned the lesson of calmness in their lives; 
 who will not allow themselves to be frustrated, 
 who will not permit their souls to be disturbed 
 and perturbed about anything; who, when 
 obstacles arise in life, go around or through 
 
84 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 those obstacles and, without much ado, continue 
 on their journey — smiHng. 
 
 Now, an ocean is not a thing of peace. I do 
 not think many writers use the ocean as a 
 figure of peace. It is too restless for that. 
 It is always restless and unsatisfied. It is 
 like a great angry Numidian lion imprisoned 
 in a cage. It roars and growls, and paws 
 against the rugged rock and mountain bars of 
 its prison, for the ocean is in prison. True 
 enough its prison is a great prison. It is the 
 earth. But it is a big ocean and, no matter how 
 big a prison is, if the prisoner's body scrapes 
 the sides of that prison it is too small a prison 
 and the prisoner will fight against its bars. 
 Did you ever stand beside the cage of a great 
 angry lion, with the question in your mind as 
 to what would happen were it to break through 
 the bars ? Did you ever stand beside the shores 
 of the great ocean with the angry sea roaring 
 and dashing itself against the shore line bars, 
 and rocks and cliffs, as though striving to be 
 released? If you have stood on such a shore, 
 you know into what a rage the waves may lash 
 themselves. 
 
 And even on a day that is comparatively 
 calm this great old ocean is a restless animal. 
 It cannot be quiet. It is like a polar bear. Not 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 85 
 
 impetuous, but restlessly pacing up and down 
 in its cage, coming and going, never ceasing, 
 ever walking without a roar of complaint, but 
 walking, walking, walking. It is unceasingly- 
 restless. 
 
 But a river is a thing of peace. It may be 
 turbulent in places, and for a few moments, as 
 the mountains try to shut it into a narrow 
 gorge. Then it becomes restless, but only for 
 a minute, and just beyond you will find it 
 moving smoothly in the sunlight of wide fields, 
 with a great placidity that is most comforting. 
 
 The brook and the creek and the smaller 
 mountain streams may shout and laugh and 
 romp and play like children let loose from 
 school. There is no quiet in them ; they are all 
 turbulency and noise and romping, and run- 
 ning, dodging around rocks for the mere fun of 
 dodging. This brook, tumbling down a moun- 
 tainside is the childhood of the river, before it 
 has grown up into quieter, more sedate, more 
 dignified ways. The brook is the childhood of 
 the river — that's all; and childhood is always 
 turbulent if it is natural. 
 
 But a river is calm; it is in repose; it is at 
 peace with the world and with itself. There- 
 fore Isaiah's figure is particularly striking: "1 
 will extend peace to her like a river." 
 
86 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Born and raised on the Ohio River, one of 
 America's most beautiful streams, I feel that I 
 too, if I had been writing the book of Isaiah, 
 would have used a figure very much like his 
 "peace like a river." I have seen the Ohio in 
 moods of anger and hate and fury, but that only 
 for a short period in the springtime. Two 
 thirds of the year it is a great, broad, peaceful 
 stream. I have watched it flowing between 
 age-old hills and far-stretching meadows, with 
 cattle standing in its shallow waters near the 
 shore, and a great peace on land and hill and 
 river. I have seen it on a midsummer after- 
 noon, with the heat shimmering on its surface 
 — at peace. I have seen it at night with a great 
 moon and myriad stars shimmering through 
 the willows, and the water lapping against the 
 willow branches — at peace. I have floated on 
 its broad breast when a great impenetrable 
 bank of fog lay over its surface in the early 
 morning, and it was at peace with the world. 
 I have seen it by twilight with the sun dropping 
 behind the Ohio hills, and peace was there. 
 
 I have followed the beautiful Hudson from 
 its source to its mighty mouth. I have 
 wandered along its placid shores up yonder 
 where Burgoyne surrendered at Schuylerville. 
 I have ridden its broad breast from Albany to 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 87 
 
 New York, along its historic ways, between its 
 magnificent Palisades, within sight of its roll- 
 ing mountains which we call the Catskills, 
 where memories of Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy- 
 Hollow and the great gray walls of West Point 
 stand out. But, above all, there is a memory, 
 and a beautifully comforting and placid 
 memory it is, of sweet peace hovering over that 
 river. 
 
 I shall never be thrilled again as I was 
 thrilled at my first sight of the broad Missis- 
 sippi, that river about which lingers the essence 
 of the romance of history, that river upon 
 whose bosom Mark Twain piloted great, broad 
 steamers, that river down which La Salle 
 floated, that river the dominant characteristic 
 of which is peace. 
 
 The great train sped along the beautiful 
 Delaware one Sunday morning as a spring rain 
 poured down with pattering insistency upon 
 its quietly flowing surface, singing as it fell a 
 song of everlasting peace. 
 
 I have stood by that great twenty-foot spring 
 of ice-cold crystal snow-water which, after 
 melting on old Mount Shasta, finds its way by 
 an underground passage until it bursts out of 
 the earth as the source of the Sacramento 
 River. From thence I have followed the turbu- 
 
88 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 lent, tumbling waters of this great California 
 river, through the wide valley that it makes to 
 "blossom as the rose" down to its mouth. 
 
 Yonder in France I have lived and I have 
 swum in the green waters of the historic 
 Marne, the Meuse, and the Loire. E^ch of 
 these rivers, like the Somme, is known to 
 history as a body of water on which some of 
 the bloodiest battles of all history have been 
 fought, but those who know them, and who 
 have lived beside them, even in war times, know 
 them for quiet, softly flowing streams, the 
 motion of which is scarcely perceptible at times, 
 flowing through green fields and under the 
 white bridges and along the white highways 
 of beautiful France. And no sight is more 
 peaceful than the valleys of these great French 
 rivers in spring, when a million red poppies are 
 blowing in the winds and a dozen great 
 chateaux loom against white clouds on the 
 opposite hillside. No wonder that Jeanne d'Arc 
 dreamed a dream and caught her vision as she 
 stood in "The Valley of Vision" at Domremy 
 overlooking the Meuse. 
 
 I have had for my friends the beautiful, 
 quietly flowing Merrimac, the Willamette, the 
 Missouri, the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the 
 Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Yangtse of 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 89 
 
 China, the Sambas of Borneo, the Pasig of 
 Luzon, the winding Saigon of French Indo- 
 China, and the great, broad breasts of the 
 rivers of the ocean, and I have never had any 
 feehng other than that of a great sense of peace 
 in their presence. "I will extend peace to her 
 like a river." 
 
 Rivers of Literature and History 
 
 Somehow rivers have been not only closely 
 linked with biblical history and literature, but 
 they also have been closely linked with secular 
 literature and history. 
 
 One never thinks of Tennyson that he does 
 not think of the Thames and Hallam ; these two 
 great comrades of "In Memoriam" floating 
 down its surface. One does not think of the 
 Merrimac that the faces of Whittier, Long- 
 fellow, and Thoreau do not come flitting peace- 
 fully before one's memory screen. One never 
 thinks of the Charles that he cannot see Long- 
 fellow and hear the sad tones of "The Bridge," 
 when 
 
 ". . . only the sorrow of others 
 Throws its shadow over me." 
 
 One cannot refer to the Rhine and the 
 Rhone without a myriad scenes — and most 
 
90 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 significant scenes — of history come thronging 
 before him. The Dnieper and the Danube 
 bring back similar memories. The Nile, with 
 its annual overflow, if it could tell its story of 
 the Pharaohs and its subsequent history down 
 through the Great War, would tell a thrilling 
 tale. 
 
 It was from the Nile that the figure of speech 
 suggested in the quotation used in the begin- 
 ning of this chapter came. It was a most 
 natural thing for the Hebrew writers who were 
 familiar with the Nile to talk of a person or a 
 nation, which worshiped Jehovah, to have 
 "Peace like a river and glory of the nations like 
 an overflowing stream." 
 
 Rivers of the Bible and Lessons Taught 
 
 A figure of speech referring to rivers is used 
 one hundred and twenty times in the Old Testa- 
 ment. In the New Testament there are seven 
 references. 
 
 The rivers mentioned by name in the Old 
 Testament are the Tigris, the Nile, the 
 Euphrates, the River of Eden, the Gozan, and 
 the Cush. The great river of the New Testa- 
 ment, of course, is the Jordan. 
 
 The idea of a river is used in the Bible to fix 
 boundaries, for bathing, for fishing, as a means 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 91 
 
 of defense, as a place of prayer, as a highway 
 for navigation, and for irrigation — for every 
 single one of which purposes it also is used to 
 this day by some people. We bound our States 
 by rivers, we erect our bathing pavilions in 
 them, and the Columbia River renders unto us 
 each year its harvest of beautiful, red-fleshed 
 salmon. The Marne has been used for cen- 
 turies of European history as a place of defense, 
 just as the Rhone and a hundred other rivers. 
 As a place of prayer we do not use rivers so 
 often, but many of us have seen most sacred 
 baptismal services held on the banks of a 
 modern river. And even as a "highway for 
 navigation" since the war rivers have come 
 into more common use. As a means of irriga- 
 tion those of us in the great West have seen 
 millions of acres of arid, acrid desert land re- 
 claimed through the utilization of our rivers. 
 
 Just as the Lake of Galilee is made most 
 precious to the Christian heart because it is so 
 pregnant with memories of Christ, so the River 
 Jordan is just as dear to us because along its 
 winding shores so many great scenes in the life 
 of our Master topk place. 
 
 I have so often thought of how close he clung 
 to this river. He never got very far away from 
 it. He was baptized and acknowledged as his 
 
92 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Father's Son on its banks, and from its waters 
 he went into the wilderness to fast and pray. 
 Mount Hermon and the River Jordan and the 
 Lake of Galilee are close together. They are 
 linked to each other by the Jordan, the moun- 
 tain and the sea, and they are even more closely 
 linked by memories of Christ. Somehow the 
 Jordan runs like a silver stream through the 
 green meadows of the New Testament. 
 
 Some of the great figures of speech of the 
 Bible center about rivers. The Psalms from 
 beginning to end seem to echo the sweet music 
 of flowing streams, and the greatest psalm of 
 all — the twenty-third — ^has as its setting a 
 river. "Beside still waters" is a sweet phrase, 
 and it suggests a picture of a shepherd and 
 his sheep and the Master and green fields that 
 will never die. 
 
 And we are reminded by the writers of the 
 Bible that the nation or the human being who 
 has God for Father and Christ for Brother, 
 that that nation and that individual has an un- 
 disturbed life, a life that has in it "peace like 
 a river." 
 
 The Christian life is an undisturbed life. 
 Wars and rumors of war may come; death, 
 pain, calamity, suffering, loss ; but the Christian 
 does not fret, for the Christian knows down 
 
RIVERS OF THE BIBLE 93 
 
 deep in his heart of hearts that "All things 
 work together for good to them that love God." 
 
 Also the Christian's destination is as inevi- 
 table as that of a river. This gives him a 
 sense of peace that is unshakable. A river 
 knows where it is going. It may be swerved 
 for a time, but it finally gets back and is on with 
 its journey. You cannot thwart it. You can- 
 not discourage it. It knows that it will find its 
 goal, which is the ocean, just as the Christian 
 knows that he will find his Father. 
 
 Not as old pessimist, Omar, would say : 
 
 "Into this Universe, and Why not Knowing, 
 Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
 
 And out of it, as Wind along the waste, 
 I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing." 
 
 But as Christ has made possible: 
 
 Into this Universe, and . . . Now knowing 
 And Thence like water, ever onward flowing 
 
 Toward the Ocean's boundless depth of Love; 
 Broader, swifter, deeper Godward Going 1 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 
 
 THE influence of the sea on the litera- 
 ture of the world cannot be over- 
 stated: no great literature, either 
 ancient or modern, but that has, within its 
 pages, the restlessness, the rolling wonder, the 
 far thunder, and the near whispering of the 
 sea. Men talk to and of the sea as they would 
 talk of a friend or an enemy. Men express 
 hate, love, envy, anger, jealousy, death, storm, 
 peace, sorrow, avarice, stoicism, hysteria, sur- 
 prise, suffering, weariness, calmness, turbu- 
 lency — indeed, every human emotion — in 
 figures of speech taken from the sea. 
 
 Recently I heard a humble man, who was not 
 an orator, but who had become strangely 
 articulate because of his interest in the present 
 world unrest, express the present crisis, as 
 naturally as a child breathes, in a tremendous 
 figure of speech taken from the sea that he 
 knows so well. He said : "I was walking down 
 along the Pacific Ocean a week ago near 
 Monterey. There had been a terrific storm for 
 
 94 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 95 
 
 a week, but the storm was over and the sun was 
 shining, and it was as glorious a morning as I 
 have ever seen. But, much to my surprise, 
 when I got down along the shore, in spite of 
 the singing of the birds, the sunshine and the 
 white clouds in the sky, the peaceful playing of 
 little children, and smoke curling lazily from 
 homes along the shore, the sea was still rest- 
 less and turbulent and uneasy. It was the 
 aftermath of the storm." And so it is with our 
 present unrest in the world. It is an aftermath 
 of the great World- War storm. The storm has 
 passed, but the ocean of life is still restless. The 
 waves still run high. There is still danger. 
 But the oil of human kindness, the oil of the 
 brotherhood of justice, of Jesus Christ, will 
 calm even that restlessness in time. 
 
 He was a comparatively ignorant, unedu- 
 cated man, and yet he was speaking classical 
 language. He was speaking great literature. 
 He had become articulate unconsciously, and 
 when he spoke the great thought that was in 
 him he used the simple, natural figures of 
 speech that came from the sea he knows so well. 
 So it has been down through the ages. So it 
 will ever and should ever be. And the won- 
 derful Bible is full of figures of speech taken 
 from the sea. 
 
96 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 It thrills one to catch these figures. One sees 
 great leviathans swimming through the pages 
 of the Book of books ; one hears great storms 
 thundering; one sees humble men fishing; one 
 sees a lonely Christ walking along the white 
 sands of the sea. One feels at home in the Bible 
 because one knows the sea. 
 
 (I heard a child who, being a preacher's 
 daughter, knew what moving meant, say, 
 "Daddy, if we have to move let's get us an 
 ocean or a lake to live by.") 
 
 I heard a man say once, "I refuse to live any 
 place where I cannot companion with a sea." 
 And I have watched that man's career in the 
 church, and he has never lost the ambition. 
 Once I saw him living and serving his church 
 down on Cape Cod, and again I saw him serv- 
 ing his church out beside the Golden Gate over- 
 looking the Pacific. The last time I saw him 
 he was in Manila on the far shores of the 
 Pacific. I have often wondered whether or not 
 he deliberately shapes his life so that he may 
 still "companion with a sea," as he told me one 
 day. All I know is that he seems to gravitate 
 as naturally toward a sea as a flower turns its 
 face to the great sun. 
 
 And the Bible is full and running over with 
 seas. Sure enough, all of them are not seas in 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 97 
 
 the way that we think of seas, for that word 
 was used, as we shall see, interchangeably, to 
 mean a lake, a great river, or an ocean. But of 
 one thing we are certain, and that is that the 
 biblical writers were familiar with the Medi- 
 terranean. And of another thing we are sure : 
 that the very first biblical scenes open on a 
 world that is nothing but sea ; and that the very 
 ending of the Book is regnant with the setting 
 of a sea in the midst of which was Patmos, the 
 Island of Patmos, the Island of Visions. So 
 the Bible is, as it were, framed in a framework 
 of seas. 
 
 There is hardly a book in the Bible, from 
 Genesis to Revelation, that does not have sev- 
 eral references to the sea. The statistics of 
 these references are interesting. Exodus and 
 the Psalms seem to have the greatest number 
 of such references ; the former having the lead 
 with thirty-two, and the latter with thirty 
 references. Isaiah has twenty-seven references 
 to the sea. In the New Testament, Revelation 
 has twenty-six references and Matthew 
 eighteen. The New Testament itself has, all 
 told, close to one hundred references to the sea 
 in its figures of speech. 
 
 The first inquiry that comes to the Bible 
 reader is. What seas did the biblical writers 
 
98 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 .actually know? Or did they mean by the ex- 
 pression "sea" just an average lake, and a com- 
 paratively small one at that, such as the Lake 
 of Galilee? 
 
 We see many references in the Bible to snow, 
 and we wonder where the Bible writers found 
 their references to snow. Then we discover 
 that the mountains of Galilee were covered 
 with snow, and that when the snow melted in 
 the spring from Mount Hermon, the waters of 
 Galilee were raised several inches. 
 
 We remember something of the thrill that 
 we had in the story of the children of Israel, 
 who were led through the Red Sea, and of the 
 east wind that swept the waves back and then 
 later drowned Pharaoh's men in the midst of 
 the sea. 
 
 It is an established scientific truth that the 
 writers of the Old and the New Testaments 
 were familiar with several of what they called 
 "seas." One was, of course, the Red Sea. 
 Then there were the Mediterranean Sea (to 
 which there are references in Exodus, Num- 
 bers, and Deuteronomy), the Dead Sea, and 
 the Sea of Galilee. 
 
 In addition to these references biblical 
 writers also frequently referred to the Nile and 
 the Eiiphrates as "seas." 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 99 
 
 The Mediterranean being the limit of the 
 western boundaries of Palestine, made the Old 
 Testament writers familiar with the sea, and 
 consequently we find them using many figures 
 of speech to carry their spiritual lessons to 
 those to whom they were speaking and to suc- 
 ceeding generations. 
 
 In addition to having direct knowledge of 
 these four seas and the two rivers which I have 
 mentioned, there were figurative references to 
 the sea made by biblical writers that are fasci- 
 nating in their aptness, their bigness, and their 
 force. 
 
 If there was any one thing more than any 
 other thingthatwascharacteristicof the Hebrew 
 writer it was his bigness of thought. He never 
 thought in terms of brooks if he could get a 
 river ; in terms of hills if he could get a moun- 
 tain ; in terms of ponds if he could get a sea to 
 express what he wanted to say. He dreamed 
 big dreams of his God; he had great thoughts, 
 and he must needs choose from the biggest 
 material thing his Jehovah had produced to 
 carry his thought to people. 
 
 His figurative references were to the 
 "deeps," which meant to him the primeval sea 
 from whence all came. His second reference 
 was to the ocean stream and subterranean 
 
100 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 waters; his third, to any great quantity of 
 water; his fourth, to the deep places of the 
 underworld, the abode of the dead. 
 
 The images of the sea were used in order to 
 teach the lessons of man's grief, which is "as 
 the unquiet sea"; the lesson of the doubtful 
 man, which is as "the waves tossed by the 
 wind"; the wicked men, who are "as raging 
 waves of the sea foaming out their own 
 shame." 
 
 Great Moments of the Book and the Sea 
 
 The first scenes which we have in the Bible 
 are ones in which the sea covered the face of 
 the earth, and God's spirit "hovered upon the 
 face of the waters" or "was brooding upon the 
 face of the waters." "And God said, Let 
 there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, 
 and let it divide the waters from the waters." 
 
 This is a weird and wonderful scene. Some 
 of us have seen it dramatized in "The Crea- 
 tion" and we have felt the dense darkness of 
 the chaos that was upon the earth. We have 
 felt the wash of ceaseless waves; we have felt 
 and heard the thunder of ceaseless surf; we 
 have felt and known the impenetrable darkness 
 that was upon the face of the earth until God 
 divided the waters from the land. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA loi 
 
 Then we have thrilled, as I have said, to the 
 story of the Red Sea and the children of Israel 
 fleeing from their slavery ; with those dramatic 
 incidents of the pause on the banks of the Red 
 Sea ; the fears in the hearts of those who were 
 being led; the doubtings of leadership; the 
 final entry into the paths of the sea wherein the 
 winds swept the waters back; the dramatic safe 
 passage of God's children and the final annihi- 
 lation of Pharaoh's army when the winds 
 turned and swept the waters of the sea over 
 them. We never had heard quite such a thrill- 
 ing story as that until we read Jules Verne and 
 Wells in later years. We never had read such 
 a thrilling story as that until in later years we 
 knew of tidal waves such as the Galveston 
 wave, and tidal waves caused by earthquake 
 upheavals in the midst of the sea, and buried 
 continents and other sea vagaries. 
 
 Then, when we read that marvelous thirty- 
 eighth chapter of Job, we were thrilled with its 
 description of the seas. We heard the thunder 
 of Jehovah's voice as Job listened : 
 
 "Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it 
 brake forth as if it had issued out of the womb ? 
 When I made the cloud the garment thereof, 
 and thick darkness a swaddling-band for it, 
 and brake up for it my decreed place, and set 
 
102 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 bars and doors, and said, Hitherto shalt thou 
 come, but no further : and here shall thy proud 
 waves be stayed ?" 
 
 What a tremendously challenging series of 
 questions that is ! How it thrills and stirs and 
 subdues and humbles one in the face of the God 
 of the seas and oceans ! 
 
 Then we remembered a certain story of 
 Jonah and the whale's stomach. It was a story 
 of the sea. It was a story which had a figura- 
 tive meaning. It was a story in which the 
 writer was trying to show how Israel, God's 
 people, was swallowed up in the stomach of the 
 Babylonians. 
 
 And then we remembered beautiful Galilee. 
 Throughout the New Testament references to 
 Galilee are many. Some of the most striking 
 scenes of the New Testament take place on the 
 shores of the Sea of Galilee. 
 
 Galilee itself is not a large lake. We have 
 hundreds of them larger in our own United 
 States. Our Great Lakes, our Chautauquas, 
 our Tahoes, are all larger than Galilee was. 
 
 It is only about thirteen miles long by seven 
 miles across. It is pear-shaped. Each spring, 
 as I have said, its waters rise when the snows 
 of famous old Mount Hermon melt and pour 
 into it just as our own Yosemite streams and 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 103 
 
 waterfalls are larger at noon time because of 
 the snows that have melted on the mountains 
 the preceding day and pour down their moun- 
 tain pathways. 
 
 Galilee is buried in a deeply depressed basin. 
 Authorities say that the Sea of Galilee has not 
 changed much in nineteen centuries, so that it 
 is about the same as it was at that time when 
 Jesus walked its beautiful banks and sailed its 
 placid surface and its storm-tossed waves. 
 The depth of the sea is from north to south 
 along the course of the Jordan River and is 
 from one hundred and thirty feet to one hun- 
 dred and forty-eight feet. This does not seem 
 very deep compared with our own mountain 
 lakes, which are unfathomable and have been 
 estimated to be thousands of feet deep. Nor 
 does the Lake of Galilee mean much in size or 
 beauty as compared with our Tahoe. Indeed, 
 we have more than twelve hundred lakes in our 
 own Sierras, many of which are larger and 
 deeper and more beautiful than Galilee, but 
 there is no such music in their names to charm 
 the world; no such romance eternal centering 
 about their very memory; no Master ever 
 walked their rugged shores ; no romance of the 
 Hope of the world ever centered in their blue 
 waters. 
 
I04 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Scenes on Galilee 
 
 Some of the most wonderful stories in con- 
 nection with the life and ministry of Jesus 
 happened on the shores of Galilee. In fact, the 
 life of Jesus might be called a great world 
 drama, with the shores of Galilee as a stage 
 and the sea itself as a background. It was a 
 wonderfully beautiful setting. 
 
 Flowing into the southern end of the lake is 
 the River Jordan. Centered about this wonder- 
 ful river, as we have seen, are some of the great 
 scenes in the life of Christ: his call and his 
 baptism. 
 
 But the first scene on the shores of Galilee is 
 that where he calls four of his disciples to fol- 
 low him. 
 
 "And walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw 
 two brethren, Simon who is called Peter, and 
 Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; 
 for they were fishers." 
 
 It was a beautiful scene in early morning. 
 You will remember that Jesus had just come 
 from his journey in the wilderness. First, there 
 was his baptism in the Jordan. After this he 
 walked down the Jordan and out into the 
 wilderness, where his temptation occurred, and 
 then back to Galilee. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 105 
 
 Here we see some of the truly tremendous 
 moments of his life spent out of doors, on a 
 river, in a wilderness, and on a sea. He went 
 from the river to the woods and thence to the 
 sea. 
 
 Then when he had called the first two dis- 
 ciples from fishing in blue Galilee he went a bit 
 further and saw two other brothers, James the 
 son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the 
 boat with their father, mending their nets, and 
 they straightway left the boats and followed 
 Jesus. 
 
 The Four Thousand Fed 
 
 The second great scene was at evening time. 
 The first was in the morning. There were only 
 six people in the setting of the first scene. 
 There are between four and five thousand in 
 the evening setting. The sun has set, for 
 Galilee is the lowest lake known to geologists, 
 and the surrounding mountains hide the sun 
 early. The four thousand had come to hear 
 Jesus preach. His fame had gone throughout 
 all the land about Galilee. His headquarters 
 were at Capernaum, and the news of his 
 miracles spread fast until people thronged 
 about him. 
 
 He saw that they had had no chance to eat 
 and that hundreds of them were hungry. 
 
io6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 When Jesus asked how much food the disci- 
 ples had, they rephed that they had seven loaves 
 and a few small fishes. And Jesus blessed the 
 food and there was plenty and to spare. "And 
 they that did eat were four thousand men, 
 beside women and children." It is the scene of 
 one of his most spectacular miracles, this beau- 
 tiful Galilee. 
 
 Jesus Walks the Sea 
 
 This is nighttime. The first great scene was 
 morning ; the second great scene of the feeding 
 was evening; but the third great scene on the 
 Lake of Galilee is nighttime. 
 
 He had just performed the great miracle of 
 feeding the thousands, and this miracle, in addi- 
 tion to that of the healings that he had per- 
 formed, aroused the people who followed him 
 to a great pitch of enthusiasm, and they would 
 make him king, whether or no. Jesus knew 
 this as he stood by the lake, while evening 
 shadows were gathering, and he withdrew into 
 the mountains to be alone. While thus sepa- 
 rated from them, his disciples, when it grew 
 dark, started to cross the lake by boat to go 
 into Capernaum. It was no unusual thing for 
 the Master to remain out overnight in the 
 mountains to pray, so they were not surprised. 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 107 
 
 Neither did they fear for him. He had his 
 
 way. 
 
 He Had a Way 
 
 He had a way — 
 
 This Christ of ours; 
 And when the day 
 
 Was through, and flowers 
 Asleep, he went to pray. 
 
 It was his way 
 
 To love the seas. 
 The rivers, mountains. 
 
 Flowers, and trees ; 
 It was his way 
 
 To search the sky 
 By night, to know 
 
 The stars, the clouds on high, 
 He loved them so. 
 
 He walked the Sea 
 Of Galilee 
 One stormy night 
 With footsteps light. 
 He brake the bread 
 With solemn tread 
 On that blest shore 
 As nevermore 
 Bread has been broke, 
 Nor ever woke 
 Such dreams, such hope 
 Where humans grope. 
 
 It was his way 
 
 To laugh and play; 
 It was his way 
 
 To dream and pray; 
 
io8 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 It was his way 
 To end the day 
 Beneath a tree 
 Beside the Sea 
 Of Galilee. 
 
 One of his ways was to pray at night on the 
 mountainsides. So that night they started for 
 Capernaum. 
 
 "And it was now dark," the story says in 
 John, sixth chapter. And — as was frequently 
 the way with the Sea of Galilee, for it had its 
 peculiar ways also — a storm came up suddenly. 
 They were frightened by the waves, but were 
 more frightened when suddenly through the 
 darkness they saw a form walking toward them 
 across the turbulent waves. Jesus saw their 
 fright and cried out to them, "Fear not ; it is I." 
 
 Nothing happens in the Bible that does not 
 have its purpose. It is orderly history, but all 
 extraneous things are left out. The essentials 
 in the life of Jesus are all in the New Testa- 
 ment. Much that would be fascinating reading 
 has not been put in, but all that is fundamental 
 has been set down for us, and it has been 
 written "with a pen of iron and the point of a 
 diamond." 
 
 And there is but one reason why poets, sages, 
 prophets and the disciples, and Jesus himself, 
 
THE BIBLE AND THE SEA 109 
 
 spoke, and that was to teach. When they used 
 a figure of speech connected with a river, a sea, 
 a tree, a bird, a desert, a rock, a wave, or a 
 storm, it was for a purpose. No figures of 
 speech idle their way into the Book. They earn 
 their way into that sacred auditorium of good 
 people and good things and high and holy 
 truths. 
 
 One may go through the Bible from the be- 
 ginning and find that where figures of speech 
 are used in connection with the sea many 
 great truths are taught thereby, but the most 
 dominant truth and the one that is more often 
 repeated than any other is the great truth that 
 is expressed in the phrase "He holdeth the sea 
 in his hands." From the fascinating story of 
 the creation of the world down through the 
 early books of the Bible, through mountainlike 
 Job into the tales of Galilee found in the New 
 Testament, and on into Revelation, one might 
 say that God is trying to show his children that 
 he holds the sea in the hollow of his great, 
 kindly hands of might and love. 
 
 "And the depth of the sea is like unto the 
 depth that is God's love" is the other lesson that 
 prophets and poets try to teach humanity 
 through figures of speech connected with the 
 sea. These two stand out above all others. 
 
no OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 True there are many more, but these are the 
 great twin stars of this figure, as it is used in 
 the Book. 
 
 Dr. Jowett tells of one of his recent trips 
 across the Atlantic when the ship was passing 
 over the spot where the tragedy of the Titanic 
 was enacted and the captain called his attention 
 to the fact, saying, "We are now passing over 
 the spot where the Titanic went down." 
 
 Dr. Jowett describes how impressive a 
 moment it was to him, and then of his thought 
 of the depth of God's love; his thought that 
 God's love was deep enough to reach down into 
 the mud of the deepest seas; high enough to 
 reach into the skies ; wide enough to reach into 
 the uttermost corner of the world. 
 
, ' :\^ 
 
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 H 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 
 
 JUST like every other great physical fact 
 of life, deserts had their influence on the 
 writers of the Bible, and they were 
 usually used as figures of speech to show what 
 sin would do to a nation or to a human being. 
 To speak shortly, deserts and sin in the Bible 
 seem to be synonymous. Sin is a desert. A 
 desert is sin. 
 
 One is astonished when he is told by science 
 that the great Mojave Desert, with all of its 
 burned-out stretches of waste and woe, is ex- 
 actly the same soil composition as the wonder- 
 ful San Joaquin Valley. Water is the differ- 
 ence. Every valley in California would be like 
 the Mojave Desert if it were not for irrigation. 
 Water it is that makes the desert to "blossom 
 as the rose." 
 
 The Hebrew children were most certainly 
 familiar with the great waste that we call the 
 Sahara Desert. The memories and knowledge 
 of this terrible place run through the minds of 
 all biblical writers. Just as the wonderfully 
 
 III 
 
112 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 clear skies of Egypt made them so familiar 
 with the stars, so that they used figures of 
 speech connected with the stars frequently, so 
 their familiarity with Egypt's great desert com- 
 pelled them to express their idea of sin and its 
 consequences and its punishments in figures of 
 speech which meant the desolation of the 
 deserts. 
 
 So one is not surprised to find such a strong, 
 figure in Isaiah as "The wilderness and the dry 
 land shall be glad ; and the desert shall rejoice, 
 and blossom as the rose." Bishop Quayle calls 
 the desert the Great Sphinx of all nature. The 
 desert is ever ominous, but fascinating in its 
 danger. 
 
 I have seen the Mojave Desert under many 
 interesting circumstances. One time that t 
 crossed it — six times, to be exact — it was dry 
 and parching under summer suns. I think that 
 I have never seen or dreamed of anything that 
 could be more desolate than the Mojave Desert. 
 You have seen inland tracts of land where 
 under a hot sun the earth bakes in great cakes 
 of hard, dry earth, as though a miniature earth- 
 quake had cracked seams all through it. For 
 hundreds of miles I have seen the Mojave 
 Desert like this. Arid, acrid, blistered, burned, 
 baked, sated, anemic, hated, bronzed, seared, 
 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 113 
 
 singed, dead, desolate, lost, barren — are all 
 words that will describe some feature of the 
 Mojave Desert under the summer sun. 
 
 Alkali pools here and there, white and ghost- 
 like as the death that they verily hold for 
 humanity, glimmer and stink under the blister- 
 ing sun. For miles at a stretch one will see the 
 stain of this alkali glinting under the sun's rays 
 like snow glistening in the light of the great orb 
 of day — ^glittering as diamonds glitter. 
 
 Sagebrush and mesquite abound, and great, 
 high-reaching cactus, that looms in the day and 
 in the night like some huge, armed phantom of 
 the desert reaching to squeeze one's very soul 
 to death. 
 
 Joaquin Miller's "Ship of the Desert" is one 
 of the most thrilling poems of American 
 topography. It is the story of a great ship that 
 sailed over the western continent when the 
 ocean was still finding its bed and its pathways 
 on our plains, ere it had been bulged back by 
 the upheavals of the Rocky Mountains. And 
 the tale is told that a ship has been found 
 buried in the sand in the middle of the great 
 American Desert in recent years. But it is a 
 ghost ship, as are all things connected with the 
 desert. 
 
 I have seen the desert by middle morning, 
 
114 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 when I thought, as the train lunged through 
 its blistering heat, that I could not manage to 
 take another breath, when I stood with a towel 
 at the faucet of the ice-water tank, applying it 
 to my head for relief. 
 
 I have seen the Mojave Desert with its dry 
 river and creek beds running for hundreds of 
 miles without a single drop of water, panting 
 under the blistering suns, like a tired dog, done 
 out with his hanging tongue lifeless. The rivers 
 and the creeks of the desert are the hanging 
 tongues of the dog of the desert. The tongue 
 of the dog desert is always out in summer time, 
 hanging lifeless. 
 
 But I have seen the Mojave Desert also when 
 it was a thing of marvelous beauty. One mid 
 afternoon, off in the distance right in the path- 
 way of the train I saw a beautiful lake, such as 
 many a weary traveler has seen before on 
 desert journeyings. It arose against the 
 horizon, and after awhile I could see a city on 
 the shores of this lake. And such a beautiful 
 city it was! I imagined that it was like the 
 Celestial City of white minarets, domes, and 
 towers. The blue, cool waters of the lake, and 
 the golden domes of the city beside the lake I 
 was sure was the next stopping place. I called 
 the conductor of the car and asked him what 
 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 115 
 
 lake that was off in the distance, and what was 
 the name of the city, and he looked at me in 
 utter amazement, and he looked at me with a 
 queer look — as if I were crazy, and I guess I 
 was, for there was ho lake there and there was 
 no city there. I had heard of a mirage all my 
 life, but I didn't have sense enough to recognize 
 one when I saw it. 
 
 I have seen an Arizona afterglow — and I 
 think that I have seen nothing more beautiful 
 than this on the desert. It is not like a sunset ; 
 it is more subtle, it is more weird, it is more 
 beautiful. I think that this desert afterglow 
 must be to the desert what the aurora borealis 
 is to the frozen planes of the north. It scintil- 
 lates with beauty. Then it is soft with a strange 
 wonder. It turns the tawny earth, and jutting 
 cliffs, and flat hilltops to a strange copper, 
 bronze, purple hue. It subdues one, this after- 
 glow on the desert, subdues one like unto an 
 evening prayer. The Angelus of the desert is 
 the afterglow. 
 
 I have seen automobiles passing across the 
 desert, and I have heard, even in these modern 
 days, ghostly stories of automobile parties 
 found dead of thirst, a hundred miles from a 
 human being or a drop of water. I have seen 
 bronzed Indians burned and blistered, driving 
 
ii6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 their sluggish ponies with water — ^precious 
 water — on their wagons. 
 
 I have seen the bleached bones of cattle and 
 horses, skeleton after skeleton, lying along the 
 tracks. I have seen here and there the coyote, 
 the waif of the desert, bounding across the 
 acrid plains. I have seen, reaching up from a 
 little mound here and there across the everlast- 
 ing desert, white crosses that have been erected 
 to mark the dying place of hosts of intrepid 
 pioneers. 
 
 But I have another picture of this same 
 desert region of America. It is a picture of the 
 desert after the rains. It is a picture of swollen 
 streams instead of dry beds of water; it is a 
 picture of freshness and cleanness, and life and 
 vegetation. It is a picture of shooting herbs, 
 and of a far spread of green, and an odor of 
 growing things. And, best of all, it is a picture 
 of a perfect mass, a blanket of beautiful, tiny 
 flowers, springing up almost overnight to cry 
 out to the world that the desert has not been 
 entirely deserted of all beauty and color. I 
 have seen the desert where the Rio Grande and 
 the Colorado flow, and I have seen green 
 stations springing up with trees and flowers, 
 and as beautiful lawns as I ever saw in any 
 place to bless the inhabitants thereof. 
 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 117 
 
 And even amid the most desolate of days — 
 even amid the most arid of stretches for hun- 
 dreds of miles around — I have seen a little 
 home, where the keeper thereof had brought 
 water from the mountains; and there I have 
 seen trees growing, and grass in a neatly kept 
 lawn, and flowers on the window sill, and little 
 children playing in the yard, and a mother 
 waving from the window as the great train 
 thundered past on into the burning, parching 
 desert. 
 
 And then I have had a dream in a poem of 
 what this great desert may some day be. I 
 have dreamed as I have passed through this 
 desert time after time, with the dying earth and 
 nothing else for hundreds of miles around me, 
 and the pulsing heat beating in through the 
 window of the fast-running train blistering my 
 face — one hundred and eighteen in the shade 
 — and, as I have talked with men who know, 
 and they have told me that exactly the same 
 kind of soil prevails in this great desert that 
 we find in the most fertile section of beautiful 
 California, and I have looked off across that 
 same desert as the train sped and I have seen 
 the great, snow-capped mountains, looming in 
 the background, awaiting the day when men 
 will take their freshness and their life-giving 
 
ii8 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 properties, and their Hope across these desert 
 plains; and as I have looked I have dreamed 
 of the next hundred years, when the European 
 wars are over and the immigration of the old 
 world has found that it must crowd out on to 
 the desert — and the necessity of the case has 
 made our great engineers bring these waters 
 of the mount&,in snows into the desert places — 
 and I have dreamed a greater city than Los 
 Angeles and a greater city than San Francisco 
 in the midst of the Mojave Desert. 
 
 And then I have heard sweeping across the 
 desert winds by noon, whispering like a 
 phantom ghost of prophecy — a voice whining 
 like a dying soul of white wistfulness, wailing 
 like a Moses in sight of the promised land, only 
 not to be a part of it : "The wilderness and the 
 solitary place shall be glad for them; and the 
 desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." 
 
 Deserts of the Bible 
 
 To get a fair idea of what the deserts of the 
 Bible mean one must, first of all, revise his 
 definition of a desert a little. The Bible desert 
 means, in addition to a Sahara, a "wilderness," 
 where there is no habitation. These words are 
 used interchangeably in the Bible : a wilderness 
 and a desert. 
 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 119 
 
 The various interpretative words and 
 phrases that we find used in the Bible to 
 describe a desert or a wilderness are : 
 
 Where herds are driven. 
 
 Without a settled population. 
 
 The abode of pelicans. 
 
 Where wild asses and jackals and ostriches 
 dwell. 
 
 A dry land. 
 
 To be arid. 
 
 Salt land. 
 
 Desolate — Devastation — Waste. 
 
 In the howling waste of the desert. 
 
 The two great deserts that stand out in Old 
 and in New Testament history are "the wilder- 
 ness of the wanderings" and "the wilderness of 
 Judaea," the former that section of country 
 southwest of Canaan, south of the Mediter- 
 ranean Sea, through which the children of 
 Israel wandered; and the latter the wilderness 
 of Judaea, which witnessed the commencement 
 of John the Baptist's ministry. 
 
 Two hundred and eighty times in the Old 
 Testament the figure of speech has to do with 
 the wilderness and the desert, and, except in 
 twelve instances, in these two hundred and. 
 eighty times the translation of the Hebrew 
 word is "wilderness." In twelve cases it is 
 
120 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 translated "desert" and one of these is that of 
 our text, where it is used as both "wilderness" 
 and as "desert," Isaiah evidently intending it 
 as a figure that should include both desert and 
 wilderness, to make it stronger. 
 
 He meant to say that, although your country, 
 your race, your souls be as dry, arid, desolate, 
 burned, parched, blistered, and bronzed, as 
 sated, anemic, bleached, as dead in sin as the 
 wilderness and as the desert, yet the flowing 
 streams of the everlasting love of God will 
 make them to "blossom as the rose." 
 
 Sin is the desert. Sin is Mojave. Sin is the 
 sneaking coyote of the desert. Sin is the acrid 
 salt of the'desert. Sin is the burning, poisonous 
 alkali. Sin is the baked, dead earth. Sin is the 
 shadow of death that hangs over a life like a 
 deceitful mirage. Sin is hate. Sin is the 
 scorpion of the desert. Sin dries up the soul. 
 Sin burns up the freshness of the heart. Sin 
 saps the cleaner emotions of life. Sin kills the 
 beautiful and the pure in a human soul. Love 
 of art, love of flowers, love for beautiful music, 
 love for children, love for wife and home is all 
 burned out of a soul that is full of sin. Sin 
 makes a soul like a desert. 
 
 And there is just one thing that will break 
 up the dried, baked soul; just one thing that 
 
THE DESERT AND THE BIBLE 121 
 
 will bring back the freshness, the purity, the 
 hope, the sweetness to the soil of that life and 
 make the desert of a sin-sated soul "blossom as 
 the rose," and that is the love of Jesus Christ, 
 and the rivers of the water of life that flow 
 through him. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 
 
 A STUDY of the stars is full of strange 
 fascination. What individual is there 
 who is not filled with a lively interest 
 when he sees a "star" shoot in the skies ? That 
 brilliant, far-off flash, which comes so suddenly 
 and is so suddenly gone — so suddenly, indeed, 
 that you scarcely have time to call your friend's 
 attention to it. It burns itself out along a path- 
 way that may have stretched out thousands of 
 miles before coming into the earth's atmos- 
 phere, which converted it into the ball of fire 
 that you see; and though it may cover a long 
 distance as a burning mass, yet it is all over so 
 quickly that you hardly have time to send a 
 message from your eye to your brain and 
 thence from your brain to your lips to shout the 
 news to your friend. One night crossing the 
 great Pacific we counted nine stars that loosed 
 their anchors in the tropical sky and plunged 
 their fiery pathway to extinction. 
 
 The Bible is full of intensely interesting 
 things, as I have said before, from poetry and 
 
 122 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 123 
 
 romance — old-fashioned romance in the Song 
 of Songs — to the great drama of Job ; from the 
 most fascinating war stories to marvelous tales 
 of the sky and stars. 
 
 The attitude of the Bible toward the stars is 
 first, that God created them. The third verse 
 of the eighth psalm reads: "When I consider 
 thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon 
 and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what 
 is man, that thou art mindful of him and the 
 son of man, that thou visitest him?" 
 
 Second, that he gave them their paths accord- 
 ing to fixed and unchangeable laws. Job, 
 chapter 38, verse 31, says: "Canst thou bind 
 the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the 
 bands of Orion ?" 
 
 Third, that he calls them by their names. In 
 Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 26, we find : "Lift up 
 your eyes on high, and behold who hath created 
 these things, that bringeth out their host by 
 number : he calleth them all by names." 
 
 The Stars of the Bible 
 
 The constellation of the Great Bear is men- 
 tioned in Job. We are familiar with it to-day 
 and can see it to-night if we look up at the 
 skies. 
 
 The constellation Orion — mentioned also in 
 
124 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Job — literally means "The Fool," the Arabian 
 name for "Orion," that constellation which 
 seems to form the shape of a man, "The im- 
 pious one." The Chaldeans called it "The 
 Giant." Therefore Job says of this star in 
 rebuking his questioners, "Canst thou loose the 
 bands of Orion?" Job pictures Orion as a 
 great, impious giant chained to the heavens. 
 Where will you find a more vivid or interesting 
 picture than this ? 
 
 "Pleiades" used in Job means "heap," 
 "plenty," "cluster," "multitude," and consists 
 of seven larger stars and seven smaller ones 
 grouped together in the sky. The Arabs called 
 this cluster of stars "The Star" par excellence 
 because of its monthly conjunction with the 
 moon. They used this conjunction to mark 
 time by. 
 
 The Persian Poets, including Omar Khay- 
 yam, thought of Pleiades as a beautiful rosette, 
 with a heart for a central star. 
 
 The name used by Luther was "Die Glucke." 
 "The Clucking Hen" reminds one of the Eng- 
 lish name "Hen and Chickens" — a large star, 
 the mother hen surrounded by a number of 
 smaller stars, the chickens, likened to a hen 
 with her brood under her wings. Maybe Jesus 
 was looking intb the skies, and this figure sug- 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 125 
 
 gested itself to him as he stood that night over 
 Jerusalem on the hill, and said, "O Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
 stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
 often would I have gathered thy children to- 
 gether, even as a hen gathers her chickens 
 under her wings, and ye would not !" 
 
 The sign of the zodiac, which comes forth in 
 season and cannot be led forth, is also men- 
 tioned in Job (see Job 38. 32). 
 
 Job was the great star man. He may have 
 been the great pessimist ; he may have been the 
 great discouraged man for a time, but after a 
 while he looked up at the stars and, when he 
 looked, his hope sprang anew in his breast and 
 he was unafraid. Job didn't look down long. 
 To look up at the stars may do many things for 
 you, but one thing it will do that I am certain 
 about, and that is that it will make you very 
 humble. And another thing that it will do will 
 be to fill your heart with hope forever. The 
 stars are God's hope beacons. Job speaks of 
 "the chambers of the south," a group of stars 
 that looked to him like great opening doors to 
 the sky chambers. 
 
 The Assyrians and the Hebrews both knew 
 that Venus, our own particular star, was both 
 a morning and an evening star. They called it 
 
126 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 "The Shining One," "Son of the Morning," 
 etc. 
 
 The Bible is full of references to the sun and 
 the moon — for example: "When the sun went 
 down," "Till the sun be hot," "Clear as the 
 sun," "The greater of the two great lights," 
 "To rule the day," "The tabernacle of the sun," 
 "Rejoiceth as a bridegroom coming out of his 
 chamber, and as a strong man to run a race." 
 
 The moon is spoken of as "The lesser light 
 to rule the night." 
 
 For four millenniums before the Hebrew 
 people, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the 
 Babylonians, the Egyptians had been studying 
 the stars. But they had been studying them as 
 gods, as forces in themselves influencing both 
 men and the earth. They were so powerful 
 that they could influence by magic vegetation 
 and human destiny. Certain crops and certain 
 favored people thrived under certain conjunc- 
 tions of stars. We still, some of us, cherish as 
 a relic of those days of ignorance the idea that 
 certain things planted "in the light of the new 
 moon" will thrive better than if planted at any 
 other time. 
 
 The ancients mentioned also believed that 
 certain stars influenced the lives of men. 
 
 The Hebrews taught the world a new idea 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 127 
 
 of our relation to the stars, and Christianity 
 has strengthened that teaching. Christianity 
 has taught the world that, instead of the stars 
 having power to kill or slay or influence, they 
 are under the powerful hand of the Eternal 
 God. God is the Master of the stars. Man is 
 free from their harmful influence. 
 
 Shakespeare caught the Christian attitude 
 toward the stars, as contrasted with the old 
 attitude, in these words: "The fault, dear 
 Brutus, is not in our stars that we are under- 
 lings, but in ourselves." In shorter words, God 
 has freed us from the influence of the stars, and 
 has given us right to go our own free ways to 
 carve our own fortunes eternally — to lose or to 
 save our own immortal souls ! 
 
 When I Consider Thy Heavens 
 
 Some people need to go out and look at the 
 stars a while to awaken them to a recognition 
 of their own insignificance. It is good medi- 
 cine for certain marked types of egotism. The 
 less intelligence a human being has the less he 
 sees in the stars. A pig never knows that there 
 are any such things as stars. I doubt if 
 the cattle of the field ever see the stars. 
 
 The higher the type of intelligence the more 
 men see in the stars of God, the Eternal. God 
 
128 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 is not the stars. The stars are not God. That 
 is pantheism. But God is back of the stars. 
 He handles them. He swerves them. He 
 guides them. He operates them. 
 
 He is the Dispatcher. I have been in a great 
 train dispatcher's office in Pittsburgh, where 
 hundreds of trains a day are directed in and out 
 of Pittsburgh. I have watched the dispatcher 
 with his charts before him ; watched him direct- 
 ing freight trains, express trains, locals, by the 
 hundreds. It was a marvelously fascinating 
 study. I can see God, the great Dispatcher of 
 the heavens, constantly doing this very thing 
 with his ultimate consciousness, with ease, with 
 power, with concentration, with poise, with 
 perfect unity. 
 
 I say, when you get to feeling slightly about 
 God and greatly about yourself — ^your poor, 
 little, infinitesimal self — go out and look at the 
 stars, as Sid says in the American Magazine: 
 
 If Your Ego Bothers You — Go Look at the Stars 
 
 A cube one seven-thousandth of an inch in diameter is 
 a pretty small object. It would not choke a mosquito. 
 You could not see it unless you used a microscope. Pos- 
 sibly, if it were made of the right kind of stuff, and if it 
 flew into your eye, you might feel it. But even that is 
 doubtful. 
 
 Yet "Uncle John" Brashear, in his delightful article in 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 129 
 
 this number, shows that a little cube just that big floating 
 around in Lake Erie takes up exactly as much room in the 
 lake, by comparison, as our earth fills in the space around 
 us, known and measured by astronomers, the boundaries 
 of which are only as far away as the nearest star. 
 
 This recalls Mark Twain's great story, "Captain Storm- 
 field's Visit to Heaven,'' wherein are recorded the diffi- 
 culties which the captain confronted in the next world 
 when he tried to explain where he came from. He said 
 that San Francisco was his native place. Nobody in 
 heaven had heard of San Francisco. Then he named 
 California, and, meeting with no response, he went on 
 with considerable irritation to mention the United States 
 and America. Nobody had heard of them. Finally he 
 claimed the earth as his former home, and at last, after a 
 long search through the records of heaven, it was dis- 
 covered that among the billions upon billions of stars, 
 worlds, constellations and planets there was, in the dusty 
 tomes, a slight reference to an insignificant speck known 
 in heaven as The Wart, and recognized by Stormfield as 
 our good old mother earth. 
 
 In this connection it is also well to remember that the 
 wonders of time are as great as the wonders of space. 
 Nobody knows or can even guess how long this Big Show 
 has been running. Anyway, it is a very old show as well 
 as a very large one. 
 
 I am glad that "Uncle John" has brought this matter 
 to our attention again. It is a good thing once in a while 
 to be set right on our comparative importance in the 
 scheme of things. At this time it is an especially welcome 
 and refreshing bit of comment. For one thing, it makes 
 the emperor of Germany seem less important. Also, it 
 will help us to pass through the egotism and dogmatism 
 of a Presidential campaign with better perspective and 
 more humor. Furthermore, the hardships we have to 
 
130 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 endure may be nothing compared with those which are 
 pestering the inhabitants of other worlds, who, for all we 
 know, may be even more self-centered and sensitive than 
 we — though this seems hardly possible. 
 
 That a knowledge of the stars helps to keep one's ego in 
 proper restraint is demonstrated in the case of Mr. 
 Brashear himself, for in all Pittsburgh, so Merle Crowell 
 tells me, there isn't a man with less ego than "Uncle 
 John." Anybody, from the mayor down to the tiniest 
 newsboy on Smithfield Street, will swear to you that he is 
 the biggest man in the city — and the simplest and most 
 attractive. Street-car motormen and conductors spy the 
 old gentleman a block away and hold up traffic for the 
 privilege of getting him as a passenger. They love him 
 because he loves them — and because arrogance and supe- 
 riority are totally absent from his make-up. From studying 
 the stars "Uncle John" has learned humility. 
 
 And if, again, in modern statistics you want 
 to feel your own utter dependence, and your 
 insignificance, and if you want to know what 
 the psalmist was talking about when he said, 
 "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy 
 fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast 
 ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful 
 of him, and the son of man that thou visitest 
 him?" go out under the night skies awhile 
 alone. Mr. John Brashear, in The American 
 Magazine, says: 
 
 No man can study the stars without becoming bigger 
 and better. The earth is too much with most of us; and 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 131 
 
 we are inclined to be too much with and within ourselves. 
 We have an exaggerated sense of our own importance in 
 the world and of the importance of the world in the 
 universe. 
 
 The science of the stars must always remain an un- 
 finished science. There are infinite areas of unexplored 
 wonders that will never come within the compass of the 
 eye of man until the glass through which he now sees 
 darkly shall be needed no more. 
 
 Most folks consider this old world a pretty big place, 
 but if you tossed a cube one-seven thousandth of an inch 
 in diameter into Lake Erie it would occupy the same 
 relative space in that great inland sea that our earth occu- 
 pies in a universe terminating at the nearest star, Alpha 
 Centauri, and extending a similar distance from our sun 
 in all directions. Such a universe contains 15,625,000,000,- 
 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (fifteen thousand 
 six hundred and twenty-five undecillion) miles, but it is 
 only an infinitestimal dot in the actual universe. Our sun 
 itself is one million three hundred thousand times as big 
 as the earth, but photometric measures have shown that 
 the heat-giver of our solar system is greatly exceeded in 
 size by perhaps a majority of the millions of stars that 
 stud the heavens. 
 
 If you could ride from the earth to Alpha Centauri, on 
 a train going at the rate of a mile a minute, you would 
 reach your destination in forty-eight million years. At 
 the rate sound travels, if a song were to be sung on Alpha 
 Centauri it would be three million eight hundred thousand 
 years before we could hear it. This neighbor of ours is 
 thirty-five trillion miles away. A spider's thread from a 
 cocoon reaching to it would weigh five hundred tons. 
 
 Our earth in its revolutions on its own axis and its trip 
 around the sun and outward into space makes a journey 
 of nine hundred and eighty-four million miles a year ; but 
 
132 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 the old clock never varies; there is never a jar or tremor, 
 and we are back again on the hundredth of a second. Do 
 you know it would have cost me one billion five hundred 
 million dollars if I had to pay my way so far at the rate 
 of two cents a mile during my journey of seventy-five 
 years ? 
 
 We usually think of the sun as a big ball of fire that is 
 benignant enough to keep the earth from freezing. But 
 science shows us that the sun can supply two billion two 
 hundred million worlds like the earth with the same 
 amount of heat — and not work overtime. If we could 
 build a column of ice fifteen miles in diameter from the 
 earth to the moon, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand 
 miles away, and then turn the sun's terrific heat on it, it 
 would take just one second to convert all that ice into 
 steam. 
 
 But we do not have to go roaming through space to find 
 wonderful things. The lover of the beautiful finds in the 
 colors of a rose the same light waves that stream from the 
 stars; he finds a kinship between the rushing locomotive 
 and the motion of the stellar worlds through space. 
 
 The more we study familiar things the more beauty we 
 find. If we study them scientifically, so much the better. 
 Some folks declare that science robs us of the pleasing 
 sense of awe and mystery. Ah, no I Science merely 
 replaces one mystery with another of a greater and 
 grander order. 
 
 Does it strip the beauty from a landscape photograph if 
 you are told that, during the exposure of your camera, 
 from forty to eighty million of light waves hammered 
 against the negative in one tenth of a second? Maclaurin 
 has given this splendid illustration of what it means when 
 a ray of violet light impinges on the negative for that 
 length of time: 
 
 "Imagine you are watching a log floating near the sea- 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 133 
 
 shore and that it strikes against a pier as it rises and falls 
 with the waves, say, once in six seconds. In order to 
 correspond to the number of light waves in one tenth of a 
 second it would have to beat against that pier for more 
 than two million years." 
 
 One night I spent at Lick Observatory on 
 Mount Hamilton, California. I had there a 
 revelation. I had lived in the valleys and the 
 low lands so long that I had come to think of 
 the stars as all being on one plane. That night 
 as I looked into the Milky Way through the 
 gpreat telescope of that world-famous observa- 
 tory I saw the stars for the first time in many 
 planes. Plane after plane, depth after depth 
 twinkled before my astonished eyes, and my 
 soul was stirred as it had never been stirred 
 before by sight of stars. 
 
 I was not only seeing the front yard of the 
 star-world but I was seeing the back yard as 
 well. And beyond that back yard I was seeing 
 the star meadows and fields ; and back of them 
 I was seeing a deep, dense forest of stars ; and 
 back of that, several rivers of stars flowing into 
 an ocean of stars. Then I saw an entire moun- 
 tain range of stars, and from this mountain 
 range of stars there were volcanoes belching 
 innumerable stars into birth. Back of this 
 mountain range of stars I saw far reaches of 
 
134 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 prairies of stars and other oceans and other 
 nations of stars until I was dizzy with the depth 
 of the star-planes. 
 
 One is impressed with the great spiritual 
 thought that God created these stars; that he 
 runs their destinies with world-old laws that 
 are unswerving; that he made their paths and 
 set them going therein, even the path of a 
 Haley's Comet, a century long; that he calls 
 them by name ; that he who numbers the hairs 
 of my head and does not fail to notice even the 
 falling of a common sparrow, that he has 
 named me also. One is impressed with the fact 
 that he too, like Job, may look up and be the 
 gfreat star man : always hopeful, always looking 
 up and not down ; filling one's heart with hope ; 
 and at the same time filling one's soul with a 
 divine humility. 
 
 And one has hope that through the stars we 
 may be brought closer to that great star that 
 shone over Bethlehem's humble bed and to the 
 Christ for whom it shone — the star of Eternal 
 Hope, the star of a great Beacon Light. And, 
 as one studies the stars of the Bible, he has hope 
 that he too may learn, through them, to chum 
 with the God of Stars like our beloved John 
 Muir, of whom it was written when he passed 
 from the vallev to the hills and thence to the 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 135 
 
 mountain peaks and beyond to walk amid the 
 stars with God : 
 
 "John of the Mountains, 
 
 Wonderful John, 
 Is over the summit 
 
 And traveling on. 
 With a smile and a hail 
 
 Where the glaciers slide 
 And a streak of red 
 
 Where the Condors glide 
 
 And John is over the Great Divide. 
 
 "John of the Mountains 
 
 Camps to-day 
 By a level spot 
 
 On the Milky Way. 
 And God is telling him 
 
 How he rolled 
 The smoking earth 
 
 From the iron mold. 
 
 Planted the Redwood trees of old 
 And hammered the mountains 
 
 Till they grew cold. 
 
 "John of the Mountains 
 Says, 'I knew 
 And I just wanted to 
 Grapple the hand of You. 
 And now that we've met 
 I know we'll be Chums 
 And camp together 'till chaos comes.' 
 
 ) y> 
 
 It was on the way from Shanghai to Manila 
 that I caught my first ghnlpse of that most 
 satisfying of all the star groups of the skies, the 
 
136 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Southern Cross. Night by night from Manila 
 to Java I watched it. It came to be a part of 
 one's very soul. It was a most satisfying thing. 
 Early in the evening it was slightly tilted as 
 the cross of Christ must have been when it was 
 first thrust into the hole that had been dug for 
 it, but by midnight the Southern Cross in 
 Manila, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, 
 or any southern viewpoint stands erect in the 
 skies, near the zenith, like a mighty cross of 
 white fire and glory. The missionaries in the 
 tropics tell me that this constellation of stars 
 comes to be to them an old friend, like a moun- 
 tain or a river. They look up at it each night. 
 When terror spreads, disease threatens, perils 
 by day and night encompass them, discourage- 
 ments confront them, somehow that fiery cross 
 of Christ hovers over them in the far ofif equa- 
 torial lands to comfort and bless. It hovers 
 over them like God's great friendly hands in 
 blessing. It says unto them each night, 
 "Peace, be still." 
 
 For eight months the Southern Cross has 
 been a constant companion. Sometimes I 
 would glimpse it from the mountaintops of 
 Luzon in the Philippine Islands; sometimes 
 from a small boat on a river's breast in Borneo ; 
 sometimes from my couch on the hillside at 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 137 
 
 night, where Java's volcanoes spit fire; some- 
 times through the trees of a jungle trail in 
 Sumatra; sometimes from north of the 
 equator, sometimes from south of the equator ; 
 sometimes from the top of a mission house at 
 midnight; sometimes from the deck of a ship 
 on seven seas. 
 
 But the one time that it burned its way into 
 my memory never to die was during a typhoon 
 on the South China Sea between Borneo and 
 Singapore. It had been blowing so terrifically, 
 with now and then that hushed, ominous warn- 
 ing of more terrific winds yet to come, that I 
 became terrified, and, dressing, left my state- 
 room and went to the bridge of the small Dutch 
 ship, whose captain I had come to know inti- 
 mately. 
 
 He was anxiously pacing up and down the 
 bridge. The sky was sullen and starless. Not 
 a ray of light penetrated that black blanket of 
 gloom anywhere from horizon to horizon. 
 
 Two hours passed. I searched the sky 
 anxiously minute after minute to catch even a 
 faint glimpse of a star. I had a feeling that if 
 I could but see one single star, it would mean 
 promise and hope. 
 
 We were sailing due south because of the 
 wind. The little ship was less than five hun- 
 
138 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 dred tons and the South China Sea was 
 ferociously playing with it. 
 
 Then suddenly the sky seemed to slit in two 
 to the south and a star — a single star — 
 appeared. The captain smiled at me and 
 pointed. A few minutes later the southern 
 winds swept back a further patch of black 
 clouds and another star appeared to the left and 
 further down in the sky toward the horizon. 
 Then a third star appeared to the right oppo- 
 site the second star. 
 
 At once I realized that a tremendous thing 
 was happening before my bewildered eyes. It 
 seemed like a miracle. It seemed like God's 
 promise of safety from storm. It brought back 
 the miracle of the rainbow on the way to 
 France. It was so dramatically wonderful that 
 I hesitate to tell it, as appearing like some fig- 
 ment of an author's imagination; but with a 
 shout in my soul and a song on my lips before 
 tear-dimmed eyes suddenly the clouds were 
 drawn back by the southern winds, as if the 
 hands of God were in them and behind them, 
 and the full and beautiful form of that star- 
 born Southern Cross lay peacefully against the 
 sky shining out over Java and the world. Other 
 stars had been breaking through these storm- 
 hid skies, but for mine eyes there was no such 
 
THE STARS AND THE BIBLE 139 
 
 glory that storm-flung night, and no such 
 peace, no such beauty, and no such thriUing 
 hope as that suggested by the white cross in the 
 southern sky. 
 
 So I think the cross of Christ, that white 
 cross of all skies, must mean to the world when 
 its storms thunder and its skies are black. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 IN a wonderfully interesting book by this 
 title, published by The Methodist Book 
 Concern, Gene Stratton-Porter names 
 seventeen distinct species of birds of the Bible 
 and gives a chapter to each bird. These birds 
 that are mentioned frequently in the Bible are 
 the dove, the eagle, the sparrow, the ostrich, 
 the cock and hen, the hawk, the quail and 
 partridge, the bittern, the swallow, the peacock, 
 the stork, the raven, the pelican, the pigeon, the 
 crane, and the owl. 
 
 More and more as one studies the Book he 
 finds that the writers of the Bible were out-of- 
 doors men, and that they were writing to an 
 out-of-doors people, and that they used out-of- 
 doors figures of speech to make themselves 
 understood by those to whom they were talking. 
 
 Beginning with Moses, Mrs. Porter says that 
 more references to birds are found in the 
 writings of Moses than in the writings of any 
 other character of the Bible. There were two 
 reasons for this. The first one was that Moses 
 
 140 
 
"o 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 141 
 
 had access to all of the bird lore, all of the 
 books and writings and knowledge of the court 
 of Pharaoh, where he lived. The second reason 
 was that Egypt was an out-of-doors land ; and 
 the people that Moses led out of their captivity- 
 lived an out-of-doors life. They didn't know 
 what it meant to have shelter from storms, or 
 sim or rain. They were compelled to live out of 
 doors. They understood the out-of-doors. 
 They knew what the stars in the clear Egyptian 
 heavens looked like. They knew the animals of 
 the desert ; they knew the birds ; they knew the 
 Nile. Therefore, when Moses wanted them to 
 understand clearly what he was trying to tell 
 them, he used figures of speech that had refer- 
 ences to the lives of the birds, just as we have 
 seen heretofore in this series that writers of the 
 Bible have used figures of speech with refer- 
 ences to trees, stars, rivers, mountains, deserts, 
 clouds, waves, fog, and snow. If all the figures 
 of speech that teach great spiritual lessons 
 through the medium of out-of-doors references, 
 were taken out of the Bible, it would look like 
 a great honeycomb with the honey removed. 
 One grows more and more astonished as he 
 follows out a thought of this kind at the almost 
 innumerable references to out-of-doors objects. 
 But at the same time one knows the reason 
 
142 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 therefor when he stops to remember that from 
 Moses down to John on Patmos, every great 
 character and nearly every great incident of 
 the Bible had as its stage setting the great out 
 of doors. And of all the figures with reference 
 to out-of-doors things, perhaps the figures with 
 reference to birds will capture and have 
 captured human hearts with the most appeal. 
 Some of the most tender quotations of the 
 entire Book have been quotations in reference 
 to birds. 
 
 It was a tenderly pathetic cry of Jesus him- 
 self, who said : "The foxes have holes, and the 
 birds of the air have nests ; but the Son of man 
 hath not where to lay his head." 
 
 It was the sweet voice of poet David who 
 tried to show the people to whom he sang the 
 protecting power and the everlasting love of the 
 Father heart: "He shall cover thee with his 
 feathers and under his wings shalt thou trust." 
 
 Do you want to take a walk out into the 
 woods of Lebanon in spring-time ? Do you want 
 to be transported, even amid winter's snows 
 and summer's heat, into the cool, awaken- 
 ing woods of early spring? Then go to the 
 Song of Solomon, that sweet love lyric: "For, 
 lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone ; 
 the flowers appear on the earth ; the time of the 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 143 
 
 singing of birds is come, and the voice of the 
 turtle is heard in our land ; the fig tree putteth 
 forth her green figs, and the vines with the 
 tender grape give a good smell." 
 
 Or, again, hear David, sv^^eet singer, as he 
 says, "I will trust in the covert of thy wings" ; 
 or, again: "In the Lord put I my trust: how 
 say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your moun- 
 tains?" And in his prayer that he be kept he 
 pleads, "Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide 
 me under the shadow of thy wings." 
 
 And of all the tender words that Jesus spoke, 
 the tenderest are these: "O Jerusalem, Jeru- 
 salem, that killest the prophets, and stonest 
 them which are sent unto thee, how often would 
 I have gathered thy children together, even as 
 a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, 
 and ye would not !" 
 
 Then, next to the above sighing of a great 
 heart, there is one other to rival it in beauty of 
 imagery: "Yea, the sparrow hath found a 
 house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where 
 she may lay her young, even thine altars, O 
 Lord of hosts, my King and my God." 
 
 Mrs. Porter says, in Birds of the Bible, 
 already referred to, a thing that we know to be 
 true in regard to our own temples and 
 churches: "Because so many of the swallows 
 
144 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 nested in the temples, the whole species was 
 held almost sacred, for any bird which built in 
 a place of worship was supposed to be claiming 
 the protection of the Almighty." Many a boy 
 has heard in springtime the twittering of 
 sparrows in the eaves of the old home church 
 of a Sunday morning while the preacher was 
 preaching. Some of us have memories of doves 
 and pigeons nesting in the old belfry of the 
 church, and vividly recall the hurried flight of 
 those birds when the sexton rang the bells for 
 church. 
 
 One morning during the great war I was in 
 France. I was sitting in springtime beside the 
 great cathedral at Toul. It was a wonderfully 
 beautiful morning, full of throbbing spring. 
 Off in the distance I could hear the great guns 
 rumbling. It seemed so incongruous that guns 
 should be in action on such a beautiful morning. 
 It was my last day on the line. I had received 
 orders to leave that noontime and I was taking 
 a last look at that beautiful old cathedral. An 
 aviation camp was located in the fields below 
 Toul. As I sat on a stone bench in the little 
 park beside the church now and then an air- 
 plane would hum overhead, so low down that 
 its shadow would pass over the great stone 
 cathedral and frighten the thousands of birds 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 145 
 
 that found shelter in its Httle crannies and 
 crevices. Each time a humming plane would 
 pass overhead, what seemed to be like a veri- 
 table cloud of birds would swarm into the air, 
 darting out of little holes and sheltering places, 
 crevices and crannies where they had found 
 shelter. For a few minutes they would literally 
 make the air black overhead and fill it with the 
 din of their frightened chattering. The only 
 other memory I have of such a dense cloud of 
 birds is of the time when as a boy, of a summer 
 evening, I went swimming in the old Ohio 
 River. I remember that often for hours at a 
 time the sky would be literally obscured by 
 dense clouds of birds flying southward follow- 
 ing the pathway of the river. 
 
 I wondered at so many birds about the old 
 cathedral. I asked the people if that was usual, 
 and they told me that the birds always found 
 shelter in the edifice, but that since the war 
 began it seemed that many hundreds of thou- 
 sands had come that had never been seen there 
 before. They said that it seemed to them that 
 all the birds of France had flown to the great 
 cathedrals back of the lines for shelter. They 
 had always been accustomed to seeing birds 
 about the cathedrals, but never in such clouds 
 and masses and swarms. They had decided 
 
146 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 that all the birds of the fields and woods along" 
 the front had been frightened back from their 
 places of habitation and that they too, like the 
 distracted people of France, had taken shelter 
 in the temples of God in war time. Now and 
 then we read a poem such as Service has 
 written for us of a lark blithely singing amid 
 the thundering guns, but those who were on the 
 front lines for any length of time know also 
 that birds were seldom seen anywhere. They 
 had all been driven back. And the truth came 
 to me on that spring morning, with startling 
 suddenness and startling warmth, that the birds 
 of distracted France had literally fulfilled the 
 scriptures and had found refuge in the temples 
 of God. And so it is that Mrs. Porter, in her 
 Birds of the Bible, confirms the childhood 
 memory of some of us: of twittering birds in 
 the eaves of the old home-town church. The 
 thought takes us back to the temple in Jeru- 
 salem, and recalls David's song of the sparrow 
 that had found her nest at the altars of God's 
 temple. 
 
 Kow THE Birds of Literature Teach Their 
 
 Lessons 
 
 Not only the writers of the Bible use the 
 birds to teach great truths to humanity, but the 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 147 
 
 writers of all time have used the birds to teach 
 their lessons. 
 
 Hear the great Burke sing the truth that he 
 learned from the lark : 
 
 "Teach me, O lark ! with thee to greatly rise 
 To exalt my soul and lift it to the skies !" 
 
 Or Byron : 
 
 "A light broke in upon my soul — 
 
 It was the carol of a bird ; 
 It ceased, and then it came again; 
 The sweetest song ear ever heard." 
 
 Shakespeare calls the lark "the herald of the 
 morn" and Browning, in "Pippa Passes," sings 
 of the lark as the morning bird : "The lark's on 
 the wing." Henry van Dyke and a dozen other 
 poets sing of the dove as the homing bird of 
 evening shadows. 
 
 And the bird of the night is by the poets 
 called the owl. And the bird of blazing noon- 
 time is the eagle; the eagle who dares to fly 
 straight into the sun. Tennyson sings of him : 
 
 "He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 
 Close to the sun in lonely lands." 
 
 Or who can forget Longfellow's soothing; 
 cry for a poem from "some humbler poet": 
 
 "Like a feather wafted downward 
 From an eagle in its flight." 
 
148 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Not less striking are the words of Bishop 
 Quayle, poet and preacher, who, reaching out 
 into the skies for a figure of speech that would 
 sing his supreme contempt for certain littler 
 things and little men, said: "I don't care a 
 fluttering feather from a seagull's wing for 
 those men and things !" 
 
 Memories of Birds 
 
 What man or woman among us does not 
 have memories of birds? Some of us more 
 than others. I knew one child not yet eight 
 years of age who would sit for an hour watch- 
 ing a bird build a nest, or simply watching it 
 in a tree or a bush. That was play enough 
 for him. And I, for one, say, bless the child 
 that learns to play with birds and flowers. 
 Blessed shall he be, for the birds and the flowers 
 shall teach him lessons of everlasting truth that 
 he could learn in no other playground of life. 
 
 One has most vivid and distinct memories of 
 scenes connected with birds, when the harmless 
 hunting of birds has been a hobby with all one's 
 life : I remember a phoebe that I watched for an 
 hour. It was the first phoebe of spring, and it 
 played around an old bridge, where they are 
 frequently found. It was spring when I 
 watched the first redwing blackbird. It was 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 149 
 
 on the way to a little country church. I had 
 my bird glasses with me and sat down on a 
 railroad bridge and listened to that redwing 
 with its sweetly rich gurgle, like water running 
 softly over stones under shaded trees. There 
 was another late Saturday afternoon as I was 
 walking six miles along a country road to a 
 little church in the country. Suddenly there 
 came the singing of a bobolink, that bird which 
 flies in long, swift sweeps and sings on the 
 wing. I watched a newly arrived flock of these 
 wonderful birds with the strange coloration of 
 white on top and dark on the bottom as they 
 played and chattered in low trees along the 
 fence. That hour will stand out forever in my 
 mind because of those newly arrived birds. I 
 shall never forget a certain Sunday afternoon 
 and the thrill of seeing a grosbeak in a tall 
 walnut tree and watching him and his mate 
 build a nest. I can see the very hillside, where 
 a ravine ran through it and a little stream 
 gurgled. I shall never forget that sleepy-eyed 
 morning in a wood, just before daybreak, nor 
 the night-hawk with its wings streaked with 
 white, half asleep on a branch overhead. I 
 shall never forget the first time and the very 
 spot that I saw that most brilliantly colored 
 red-headed woodpecker, one of three types of 
 
I50 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 woodpeckers — including the hairy and the 
 downy. It was beside a river ; a small river, in 
 a little park, back of a hotel in Pennsylvania. 
 I watched it pecking away at a tree, with its 
 crimson head flashing in the sunlight and its 
 coal-black body and its snow-white feathers 
 scintillating together. I think there are no 
 such brilliant contrasts of color in any bird. I 
 shall never forget the orchard in California 
 where a Baltimore oriole flashed through the 
 green trees with its orange and crimson. Nor 
 the brilliant mid-morning when I saw my first 
 scarlet tanager; nor that afternoon on the 
 banks of the Ohio where I caught my first 
 glimpse of the crimson cardinal (red bird). 
 
 And just a few days ago I added another 
 bird picture to the everlasting gallery. I was 
 watching a great airplane fly overhead. As I 
 was watching that plane, suddenly a vibrating 
 humming-bird shot like a blaze of fire across 
 my vision and poised itself like a quivering 
 tuning fork in the air before a crimson trumpet 
 flower and then shot its long beak into the heart 
 of the flower to extract the honey. I turned 
 from the plane and forgot it. It was so feeble, 
 and so helpless, and so uninteresting compared 
 with that humming-bird. 
 
 Once, at another time, I remember being im- 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 151 
 
 pressed with the superiority of the bird in the 
 air over man. It was in Boston and I was 
 watching my first air-flight exhibit. It was a 
 thriUing day. Such heights as ten thousand 
 feet in the air astonished the world then. It 
 was a windy day. Several of the most spectac- 
 ular stunts were not allowed and not possible 
 that day because a wind of sixty-five miles an 
 hour was blowing. And all the while a lot 
 of seagulls were soaring leisurely through the 
 air against the wind and playing like children 
 let out of school in summertime; taking the 
 wind waves in long, graceful sweeps, with per- 
 fect ease, now flapping their great white 
 strong wings leisurely; now floating like a 
 coasting automobile, or swimming, swept on 
 the crest of a great surf wave. And all the 
 while man's engines were spluttering and 
 thundering and noising about over the grounds, 
 getting as if ready to fly and flying not. 
 
 God's Care for Us 
 
 "He shall cover thee with his feathers, and 
 under his wings shalt thou trust." All through 
 the Book, prophets and poets and teachers — 
 aye, the eternal Christ himself — try to show to 
 humanity God's care for his children with a 
 bird figure. It is a beautiful figure. There is 
 
152 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 but one other as beautiful, and that is the old, 
 old figure of the shepherd caring for his sheep ; 
 and this is always the most tender of all to me. 
 Another day, as David watched a mother 
 bird flying over her nest, he cried out, "1 will 
 trust in the covert of thy wings." Somehow 
 we have learned to expect from the bird life 
 this protection to young. Even to-day, as we 
 study bird life, we find innumerable stories of 
 mother birds and father birds who have been 
 willing to sacrifice themselves that their young 
 may live. Perhaps the most striking and uni- 
 versal illustration of this willingness to self 
 sacrifice is found in the story of the quail. And 
 what boy who has lived in the woods has not 
 seen an example of it time and time again? 
 We have seen a mother quail, when one 
 approached her nest of young ones, run out 
 and throw herself on the ground, simulating a 
 broken wing that she might lead the stranger 
 away from her family. She was willing to 
 throw herself into the path of danger and even 
 to sacrific her own life that her young might 
 be safe. Once in a little village that I know in 
 the East this story of the sacrifice of a bird 
 came to the attention of some of my own 
 friends. It was a common pair of martins. 
 They had for years built their nest in a little 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 153 
 
 bird house on the public square. When fall 
 came each year they would go South together 
 — this loving pair of birds. But one fall they 
 did not go. The folks saw the male bird flying 
 in and out of the nest, just as if he intended to 
 stay. Frosts came and still he did not go. The 
 female bird was not seen. It grew colder and 
 colder, and people wondered why the birds did 
 not go South. They would freeze to death 
 when the ice and snow came. The male bird 
 kept going and coming all the time, carrying 
 food into the box. Then one morning they 
 found him frozen at the bottom of the nest, and, 
 when they climbed up to the box, they found 
 out why he had remained behind when the 
 other birds had gone. They found that the 
 mate of this bird had in some way gotten a 
 heavy string fastened to her foot and could not 
 fly, and, rather than leave her, he had remained 
 behind in spite of the age-old instinct to migrate 
 when the winter came. He had remained loyal 
 even unto death. He would not desert his mate 
 and let her starve to death. 
 
 And so we can see that there was no better 
 way, no tenderer way for David to make clear 
 God's great Fatherly care and love for us, his 
 willingness even to sacrifice his own Son, than 
 in the words he used as he saw a mother bird 
 
154 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 hovering over her nest with protecting wings : 
 "He shall cover thee with his feathers, and 
 under his wings shalt thou trust." 
 
 God Desires that We Trust Him 
 
 The birds teach us not only God's care for 
 us, but they teach us to put our trust in him. 
 They teach us faith in him and in his power 
 and strength. David gives us the text again: 
 "In the Lord I put my trust : how say ye to my 
 soul, flee as a bird to your mountain?" Or, 
 again, "I will trust in the covert of thy wings." 
 Or, again, "I will haste me to a shelter from 
 the stormy wind and tempest." 
 
 Here God is pictured as a great mountain 
 rock, as a mountain of hope, as a great rugged 
 tree in which we may trust and find shelter 
 from the stormy blast. 
 
 There are several versions of the origin of 
 that great hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my soul." 
 Probably the best-known story concerning its 
 production is that in which the author is pic- 
 tured as "sitting at an open window, when a 
 little bird, pursued by a hawk, flew in and took 
 refuge in the poet's bosom," the incident sug- 
 gesting the hymn. While this story in itself 
 has no historical support, it may well be 
 adapted to the troubles and distresses of this 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 155 
 
 present life. The poor, helpless bird may 
 typify many a stricken human soul. Such a 
 soul — a woman — came to my attention once 
 while I was preaching at a camp meeting. She 
 wrote a pathetic letter, and said in that letter : 
 
 Dear Mr. Stidger: 
 
 Please forgive me for this intrusion, but I am writing 
 to you in hopes of your being able to help my husband in 
 his terrible conflict. 
 
 I am heartbroken and have all but gone insane the past 
 year, for my husband, through prosperity and worldly 
 companions in business, has backslidden terribly. And O, 
 Mr. Stidger, still worse — he has permitted another woman 
 to come into his life, and now he says he is going to break 
 up our home, leaving me and our baby girl, five years old 
 (though when he was an ardent Christian he pleaded to 
 God for her and promised to raise her for him). 
 
 He has been so near insanity with his sin that he has 
 even threatened suicide. My parents and I prevailed on 
 him to drive down to your meetings last week, and he was 
 much impressed with your sermons, and since Sunday he 
 has said he knew he had done wrong, but through his 
 pride and stubborn nature he is not willing to yield. He 
 has promised to take us down again Sunday and — forgive 
 me for making suggestions — but how I wish you might 
 have some kind of a service Sunday asking for those who 
 have wandered away and want to get back to the Lord to 
 come forward to the altar, or some such service. My 
 prayer is: "Anything, Lord, to bring him to thee." We 
 will be at the morning service and I rather expect will 
 stay for the evening service. 
 
 We are Methodists and members of . 
 
 I pray, Mr. Stidger, that Sunday may be the day of victory 
 
iS6 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 in our home. Thanking you for your confidence and in- 
 terest, I am, 
 
 A heartbroken wife. 
 
 The storm was buffeting this poor woman 
 and her home and her child and her husband 
 about. It was dashing their Httle home to 
 pieces against the cHffs of life. She felt help- 
 less in the sweep of it. 
 
 It was a week after I had received that 
 letter, and Sunday night. As I was leaving the 
 great auditorium of the camp grounds a pretty 
 little woman came up to me timidly. She was 
 leading by the hand a dear little girl about the 
 age of my own baby. There were tears in her 
 eyes. She was trembling with suppressed 
 emotion. At first she could not speak. We 
 stood in the darkness for a few minutes and I 
 watched the shadows of evening play on the 
 white sand dunes and the stars shining in the 
 purple waters of the sea as I waited until she 
 could command her feelings. 
 
 "Well," I asked her, "are you happy about 
 something?" 
 
 "Yes," she replied, "I am the woman who 
 
 wrote you that letter from . Did 
 
 you get it?" 
 
 I told her that I had received it. 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 157 
 
 Then she told me of how her husband had 
 that morning, following my invitation, risen in 
 his place and, before a great crowd, with hun- 
 dreds of others, walked up the aisles of the 
 auditorium and knelt at the altar; that he had 
 come home happy and laughing in his soul to 
 be the same tender man that he had been before 
 the unhappiness had come into his life. As she 
 got to talking of what that thing meant to her 
 home and to her baby and to her own life, she 
 choked up and could scarcely speak at all. 
 After a moment's silence she held out her hand 
 and said: "I cannot tell you. I cannot talk. 
 But you understand, don't you ?" 
 
 Yes, I understood. I have always under- 
 stood, I have understood from the beginning 
 that, when the storms come into our lives and 
 we seem swept on blasts that are so much 
 stronger than we, swept in among the rocks by 
 waves that are overpowering, swept in by 
 primordial passions and sins and lusts, there 
 is but one place to flee : 
 
 "I will haste me to a shelter, from the stormy 
 wind and tempest." 
 
 "I will trust in the covert of thy wings." 
 
 God's Love for Us 
 The birds also teach God's love for us. 
 
158 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Jesus himself gave us the text : "O Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and 
 stonest them which are sent unto thee, how 
 often would I have gathered thy children to- 
 gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens 
 under her wings, and ye would not." 
 
 Of all the birds on earth the most despised is 
 the sparrow, because it is so common. The 
 sparrow has about twenty different species. I 
 know five or six of them. There are the song 
 sparrow, the vesper sparrow, the field sparrow, 
 the white-throated sparrow, the common Eng- 
 lish sparrow, etc. It is a very common bird. It 
 has five to six hatchings a year and from 
 twenty to thirty new sparrows come forth. It is 
 indeed a common bird. It is not a pretty bird, 
 either in color or form or song. It eats of the 
 dunghills. It is so common. It is despised and 
 hunted and shot by man. All over the earth 
 it is one of the outcast birds. 
 
 It is an outcast bird everywhere but in the 
 Bible. In her chapter on the Bible, Mrs. 
 Porter does not list the sparrow with the birds 
 of "abomination." No! Why not? It is 
 despised of man. She does not list it there 
 because the Bible has given even the common 
 sparrow — the meanest, lowest, ugliest, com- 
 monest of all birds — an exalted place. It has 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 159 
 
 told of how "even the sparrow" hath found her 
 a nest in the temple. And Jesus himself 
 declares that not even one sparrow falleth to 
 earth without the Father's knowledge. 
 
 Anybody can love a beautiful scarlet tanager, 
 or a Baltimore oriole, or a pretty wren, or a 
 grosbeak, or a flashing redwing; anybody can 
 love and admire a mighty eagle soaring along 
 the river pathway; anybody can love the spot- 
 less white of a seagull; anybody can love a 
 vibrant humming bird or a nightingale, sweet 
 with dripping music; or a lark soaring in the 
 skies, "a sightless song"; or a dove in a green 
 tree at springtime, even though its note is 
 mournful. Anybody can love the sweet, sad 
 music of a whip-poor-will, or a yellow summer 
 bird; but it takes a great Fatherheart, it takes 
 our God, to love a sparrow, a common sparrow, 
 so that not one falls to the earth without his 
 notice. 
 
 And he not only loves us, but he has infinite 
 power to help us when we need him. We can 
 trust him for that forever. We can trust him, 
 for he loves us with an everlasting love. We 
 can trust him even when we do not know why 
 he is doing certain things to us. 
 
 There is the story of the naturalist who was 
 watching an eagle teach her eaglet to fly. The 
 
,i6o OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 nest was up on a high diff. The naturalist 
 noticed a lot of excitement and fluttering on 
 the cliff, and he crept close above the cliff to 
 see what was going on. He saw the mother 
 eagle forcibly pr.sh her eaglet off the cliff to 
 teach it to fly. Then she watched it with her 
 eagle eye. When she saw that it was not going 
 to bear itself up at the first attempt, she darted 
 downward, and flying under the falling bird, 
 gently swept up under it and let it rest on her 
 broad, strong back. Then she carried it back 
 to the cliff. 
 
 After a while she pushed it off again. Tne 
 action seemed almost brutal, but the naturalist 
 understood. Then the mother eagle watched it 
 a second time as it struggled to fly, and succeed- 
 ing but poorly at it. Then a second time she 
 swept down under it before it hit the rocks 
 below and gently let it alight on her broad back 
 and carried it back to the cliff. A third time 
 she pushed it off and repeated her performance 
 of sweeping down under it before it was dashed 
 to death, and again carried it on her strong 
 wings back to safety, and finally in this manner 
 taught it to fly. 
 
 And so, figuratively speaking, it is that God 
 often teaches us to fly. No matter how much 
 we may misunderstand what is happening to us, 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE i6i 
 
 no matter how helpless we are, no matter how 
 far we fall, no matter how much danger looms 
 ahead, no matter how much everybody and 
 everything — even God himself — ^may seem to 
 have forsaken us, we may always know that 
 God is still up there "keeping watch above his 
 own"; still up there on the cliff, watching to 
 see the moment when we need him most; still 
 up there watching, and not one of us shall fall 
 without his notice ; not one of us needs him and 
 cries unto him that he will not come; still up 
 there knowing our weaknesses; knowing that 
 our attempts to soar and fly are, after all, but 
 feeble attempts; still up there with his great 
 strong wings of love, ready to fly down under 
 us and catch us when we fall ; and shelter us int 
 the shadow of his wings ; and carry us up, up,, 
 up to heights of glory and hope and everlasting- 
 peace. 
 
 He it is who gives the gull such fearless" 
 wings ; he who puts such flame in the sea gull's 
 breast as makes that glorious bird swing to the 
 storm with laughter in its heart, swing out on 
 the trackless shoreless deep as if the law of 
 gravitation to it were but a little thing. 
 
 To those who have lived by or sailed the sea 
 streams the gull is ever and always a new 
 adventure, whether one sees it days out beyond 
 
i62 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 the furthermost sentinel or rocky island or 
 tumbling its white winged beauty over a bay or 
 inland lake. One of the most beautiful things 
 I ever saw was the changing reflection of the 
 blue, green, purple waters of Lake Tahoe on 
 the under white of a sea gull's wings. 
 
 I called that beautiful thing to the attention 
 of a friend, and he said, "Yes, and did it ever 
 occur to you that that gull's wings have to be 
 clean in order to reflect the waters of the lake?" 
 And so, I take it, we too have to be clean and 
 white and pure in order to reflect the beauty 
 and glory of God's love to folks. 
 
 Far out at sea on the way home from the 
 Orient the sea gulls met us. They were not 
 land gulls but what are called by the sailors sea 
 birds. They live at sea most of the time, and 
 rest on the waves when they are weary with 
 flying, and it is a beautiful thing to see their 
 long, slender, graceful wings spread as they 
 skim the waters and finally light, like a downy 
 feather, without a ripple of blue water breaking 
 the surface. 
 
 Birds of the boundless deep, 
 
 Where do you rest when you sleep? 
 
 Forever and ever you seem 
 
 To swing on the ocean's stream 
 
 And ever and ever your broad wings sweep 
 
 Over the restless, boundless deep. 
 
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE 163 
 
 "We rest when the night is near, 
 Rest without thought or fear; 
 Drop to our rest 
 On the great broad breast 
 Of the ocean's swing and sweep, 
 In the ocean's love and keep.'' 
 
 Birds of the ocean way. 
 How can you laugh and play? 
 How can you flash and swing 
 Your beautiful spread of wing 
 With never a thought of the far- 
 Flung leagues where the mountains are. 
 When land is so far away 
 And waning the light of day ? 
 
 "We spread our wings on the winds of light 
 And rest in the calm of the starlit night; 
 The deep is our habitat — we fly 
 By a faith that lightens the earth and sky ; 
 For faith is a flame that burns in the breast 
 Of a creature out on the boundless quest." 
 
 Then teach me, bird of the ocean blue. 
 The faith that burns in the heart of you — 
 Teach me to spread my wings and fly 
 Out on the deep when the storms beat high; 
 Teach me to fly and be at rest 
 Wherever my path, on the Father's breast. 
 
 Teach me, bird of the boundless deep, 
 That faith will ever and ever keep; 
 Though stable ways of the land be far; 
 And never the sky shows out a star ; 
 Teach me that faith is a flame in the breast— 
 A flame that is urge and a flame that is rest. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 BURBANK AND THE BOOK 
 
 Spiritual Principles of Luther Burbank 
 
 FEW people know Luther Burbank as a 
 great spiritual man. They know him as 
 the great plant-breeder and as the great 
 scientist, but few know him as a man who con- 
 sciously or unconsciously works in the plant 
 world on a solid foundation of great spiritual 
 principles that have their birth in the Bible, 
 a book for which this great man professes the 
 deepest reverence, and which he reads continu- 
 ally. 
 
 Readers may wonder why I put these two 
 concluding chapters on Luther Burbank and 
 John Muir in this book. I answer, that I do it 
 with a purpose, and that purpose is to link the 
 two great out-of-doors men of this day and age 
 with the great out-of-doors men of the Book of 
 books. I do not mean by that to place them 
 alongside of the prophets and poets of the Bible, 
 but only to show that any men who are close 
 to nature are also close to God and truth and 
 righteousness. I insert them here also because I 
 
 164 
 
BURBANK AND THE BOOK 165 
 
 have in recent years been so deeply impressed 
 with the great spiritual truths that guided the 
 lives of these two great modern men of nature. 
 There is some close connecting link between a 
 love for God and a love for nature. I have 
 discovered it in the lives of these two men. 
 Each man, as he has discovered the secrets of 
 nature, has been drawn closer to God, just as 
 were Isaiah, Job, David, and John of old. 
 Those who know, and knew, Burbank and Muir 
 intimately testify to the deep spirituality of 
 their lives. Indeed, they worked with great 
 spiritual forces. 
 
 One of the most impressive things about Mr. 
 Burbank's personality, his methods of living, 
 his work, and his thought world to me is the 
 spiritual impress of it on the whole. One feels 
 when he is in the presence of Mr. Burbank that 
 he is dealing with a great spiritual dynamo; a 
 tremendous spiritual medium. I have not 
 come to the place where I can follow Lodge into 
 the spiritual world and have communion with 
 folks over there, but I had the strangest feeling 
 as I stood in the presence of Luther Burbank, 
 and heard of the wonders he has worked, that 
 here was an uncanny man, a man who has 
 somehow reached out and gotten hold of in- 
 visible forces and harnessed them. And yet he 
 
i66 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 is none of that. He is just a simple, plain man 
 who loves nature and who dislikes more than 
 anything else to be called "uncanny." That he 
 cannot abide. And yet there are great funda- 
 mental spiritual truths at the very basis of his 
 work, truths that obtrude themselves into your 
 heart by their very apparentness. 
 
 The first observation I want to make of the 
 spiritual implications of his work with plant 
 life is that ofttimes out of a weed may spring a 
 beautiful flower. Time and time again Mr. 
 Burbank has developed a beautiful flower of 
 purity and whiteness and perfume out of a 
 despised weed that has been an outcast and a 
 leper for centuries. An instance of this one 
 finds in the Shasta daisy; a flower despised by 
 farmers in the East, but one which he has 
 developed until it takes a place among the most 
 graceful and beautiful of all. 
 
 In Mr. Harwood's book, New Creations in 
 Plant Life,' the most understanding and sympa- 
 thetic of all the books written about Mr. Bur- 
 bank, and written after careful months of living 
 with him in intimate friendship, the author, in 
 speaking of this possibility that ever exists in 
 the rankest weed and outcast plant, uses this 
 
 ' The Macmillan Company, Publishers, New York. 
 
BURBANK AND THE BOOK 167 
 
 striking sentence: "Now and then out of the 
 muck of some slum, reeking with moral filth, 
 and developing with unwholesome rapidity the 
 seeds of anarchy and crime, a white, pure life 
 springs up, persists, maintains its guard 
 against all temptations, comes back, mayhap in 
 later years to help redeem its birthplace." And 
 so it is with the human life. Sometimes out of 
 the muck and slime of tenement districts, out 
 of the swamps, the black swamps of human life, 
 a white flower of celestiallike purity may spring 
 to redeem its surroundings. 
 
 A second spiritual principle that Mr. Bur- 
 bank finds in the world in which he works is 
 the principle that you can redeem a plant by 
 giving it a new foundation on which to work. 
 
 He finds a certain fruit with a high per- 
 centage of sugar and flavor which seems to be 
 degenerating. What can be done to save it? 
 "Why, give it a new foundation on which to 
 work and live and build. So he grafts it into a 
 new life. He gives it the regenerative power 
 of new blood and this redeems the plant." And 
 nowhere does he fail to leave the implication 
 that this is true in human life. And nowhere 
 can a thoughtful man fail to catch the implica- 
 tion that a human life that is degenerated and 
 that is losing grip and losing hope, grafted on 
 
i68 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 the life of the sturdy, pure stock of Jesus the 
 Christ will be redeemed and started on a new 
 life with a new foundation. It is a thrilling- 
 parallel ; infinite with possibilities. 
 
 A third spiritual simile is that found in trees. 
 It might be stated in this sentence : "It is what 
 is inside the soul that tells for eternity." It 
 was in his experimentation with trees that this 
 principle was enunciated. It was in trying to 
 develop a tree with wood hard enough for com- 
 mercial purposes. In this work the most im- 
 portant thing is the grain. You cannot tell 
 from the outside of a tree, according to Mr. 
 Burbank, just what the inside grain will be. 
 It may be light or dark; it may be close-grained 
 or coarse ; it may be plain or beautiful ; but you 
 cannot tell from the outside what is on the 
 inside, and it is what is on the inside that counts 
 in the manufacturing of various commercial 
 articles. 
 
 And so it is in the light of eternity. It is 
 what is on the inside of a human soul that 
 counts in the eyes of God. One may be fair 
 without and well groomed, and have such 
 standing in a community as kings might envy, 
 but the supreme test of eternity is what is on the 
 inside of a human soul. 
 
 Mr. Burbank himself is the best human illus- 
 
BURBKNK AND THE BOOK 169 
 
 tration of this spiritual principle I ever saw. 
 He always wears old clothes. In fact, if one 
 met him on the highway alone, he might take 
 him for a loafer or a tramp. All he would 
 need would be a roll over his shoulder. His 
 clothes are frequently covered with dirt because 
 he is so often on his knees among his flowers. 
 But inside Luther Burbank is a veritable 
 spiritual king. 
 
 A fourth spiritual principle is that "By care- 
 ful breeding, food and love, the most insignifi- 
 cant plant on earth may become the most signi- 
 ficant." It was by searching out the humble, 
 unobtrusive little golden California poppy, that 
 hid its sweetness in the desert air, that Mr. 
 Burbank found a streak of crimson in one petal, 
 and from that tiny streak he developed a full- 
 blown crimson poppy. It was from the wild 
 beach plum, a knotty, gnarled, bitter-to-the- 
 taste, sour, and insignificant outcast, that he 
 developed the giant new plum that is five hun- 
 dred times the size of the beach plum. It was 
 from the wild Arizona potato, so knotty and 
 small and insignificant that they were no larger 
 than peanuts, that Luther Burbank developed 
 the great, new Burbank potato to its full per- 
 fection. From a black desert potato, no larger 
 and with about the same looks as a dried-up 
 
I70 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 raisin, came this great, fruity, sugary product. 
 It was from the insignificant wild daisy, 
 scrawny and small and despised, that he 
 developed the beautiful Shasta daisy. And so 
 on and on the story might continue. 
 
 And so one is led to see that no child is so 
 puny or so ugly or so unfortunate or so insig- 
 nificant-looking but that, with love and care 
 and food and sunlight, that child may develop 
 into a miracle of power on earth among men. 
 And what is true of a child is true of a man or 
 a woman, as Jesus undoubtedly knew when 
 he forgave so tenderly the woman taken in 
 adultery. 
 
 The fifth spiritual lesson is the summing-up 
 of the relations of breeding plant life to that of 
 breeding children in spiritual life. It may be 
 stated in four sentences : "The child is the most 
 sensitive plant on earth"; "The child is the most 
 plastic plant on earth" ; "It will respond to 
 repetition just as a plant will" ; and "Once 
 fixed, a quality or spiritual power and a trait 
 will stay with a child forever." 
 
 Mr. Burbank gave me these four spiritual 
 principles from his own lips as we got to talk- 
 ing about his hobby, which is children. 
 
 The sixth great spiritual thought is that if 
 one looks patiently enough for and searches 
 
BURBANK AND THE BOOK 171 
 
 in love he may find the soul, hidden though it 
 may be, of any plant, human or otherwise. 
 
 One of the most thriUing stories of Mr. Bur- 
 bank's work is that of the discovery of the soul 
 of the dahlia. As his friends themselves tell it, 
 one day he was walking along in his gardens at 
 dusk, that part of the day when perfumes are 
 strongest in California. One who has driven 
 in the evening will remember this fact. As he 
 was walking among his dahlia beds he suddenly 
 detected a strangely sweet odor. Upon dis- 
 covering the particular plant that was giving 
 oflf this perfume, faint though it was, rather 
 than the usual disagreeable odor of the dahlia, 
 he isolated it at once and developed it. 
 
 Another evening he was walking among his 
 verbenas, and he caught an elusive scent. He 
 got down on his knees and searched for it all of 
 one evening, but failed to find it. He tried time 
 and time again when he caught that strange 
 scent and, finally, in a burst of joy found the 
 plant. It had the subtle fragrance of the trail- 
 ing arbutus. He had "found the soul" of both 
 of these flowers. Flowers that he thought never 
 had had any odor but an ugly one he discovered 
 had wrapped up in their beautiful bodies and 
 petals a wonderfully sweet perfume. 
 
 And so, the implication always is from Mr. 
 
172 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Burbank, that so it may be with what seems to 
 be a soulless and a heartless human child or 
 man. 
 
 A seventh great spiritual truth suggested by 
 Mr. Burbank is that a plant-breeder is "an 
 explorer into the infinite." How much more 
 so then is one who deals with the plant called 
 a human being "an explorer into the infinite" ! 
 
 The eighth and last great spiritual principle 
 with which Mr. Burbank works in the plant 
 world is that expressed in a sentence I heard 
 him use : "/ have been compelled to put the old 
 selves of some plants to death that out of this 
 death there might come forth a new resurrec- 
 tion." And therein he has summed up the prin- 
 ciple that has made Calvary and the third day 
 afterward the most active spiritual principle in 
 the hearts of humanity. And Mr. Burbank has 
 come to this conclusion through literally mil- 
 lions of separate experiments. He has crossed 
 and recrossed. He has, as his biographer says, 
 "Combined each with the other, joining them in 
 a union as intimate as life, as powerful as death. 
 For he was compelled to put to death their old 
 selves — their long life habits, their manner of 
 life — even their form and texture, all must 
 give way — and from this death he would bring 
 forth a new resurrection." 
 
BURBANK AND THE BOOK 173 
 
 His own statements prove the deep spiritual 
 impulses of the man : 
 
 My theory of the laws and underlying principles of 
 plant creation is, in many respects, opposed to the theories 
 of the materialists. I am a sincere believer in a higher 
 power than man's. Every atom, molecule, plant, animal 
 or planet is only an aggregation of organized unit forces, 
 held in place by stronger forces, thus holding them for a 
 time latent, though teeming with inconceivable power. 
 All life on our planet is, so to speak, just on the outer 
 fringe of this infinite ocean of force. The universe is not 
 half dead, but all alive. 
 
 Reverting to his love for a little child, we 
 recall the picture of Joaquin Miller, another of 
 our California giants : 
 
 "Then reaching his hands he said, lowly, 
 'Of such is my kingdom,' and then 
 Took the little brown babes in the holy 
 White hands of the Saviour of men. 
 
 "Put his face down to theirs and caressed them. 
 Held them close to his breast as in prayer ; 
 Put their cheeks to his cheeks and, so blessed them; 
 With baby hands hid in his hair." 
 
 And, allowing that verse to bring vividly 
 back once again that greatest of all scenes in 
 the life of the Master, I want to link up all that 
 I have said of the spiritual forces in this man's 
 life, and of his love for little children in the 
 final quotation from one of his addresses: "I 
 
174 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 love sunshine, the blue sky, trees, flowers, 
 mountains, green meadows, running brooks, 
 the ocean with its waves softly rippling along 
 the sandy beach, or when pounding the rocky 
 cliffs with its thunder and roar, the birds of the 
 field, waterfalls, the rainbow, the dawn, the 
 noonday, and the evening sunset — ^but children 
 above them all." 
 
3 
 
T^ 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MUIR AND THE MASTER 
 
 HOSE who knew John Muir, those 
 ■ who followed his life from his boy- 
 -*• hood on, those with whom I have 
 talked out here in his great West, some of 
 whom knew him when he used to visit a little 
 Methodist church in California, where he found 
 his wife singing in the choir, that wife who 
 was later his constant companion on his moun- 
 tain trips ; those who know his books, know that 
 in walking the high passes, in climbing the 
 Shastas, the Raniers, the Saint Helens, the 
 Glaciers, and Meadows and Bee Pastures, John 
 Muir was always walking with God. He might 
 well have stopped amid the great silences of 
 some vast canyon, or amid the solemn stillness 
 of some one of the more than fifteen hundred 
 glacial lakes that he has found in the Sierras ; 
 or he might have stopped under the thundering 
 of a Nevada Falls in his beloved Yosemite ; or 
 he might have lifted his eyes to the skies one of 
 the several nights he was storm-bound on 
 
 175 
 
176 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Shasta's steaming crater, or that other night 
 when he dimbed the great Redwood to listen to 
 the storm ; he might have paused and said, amid 
 the silences or amid the thundering: 
 
 "I hear and to myself I say, 
 'Why, God walks with me every day.' " 
 
 For that is literally what God did and what 
 Muir did. God and John Muir walked together 
 on earth among the sequoias that were born, 
 according to Edwin Markham and Muir him- 
 self, before Christ; and over the Mono Pass; 
 and across the Glacial Meadows and Bee 
 Gardens; over the glaciers of Alaska, up and 
 down the Atlantic Coast, and across the con- 
 tinent ; and now, that he is gone, he walks with 
 God amid the stars. That is sure. That was 
 inevitable. No man can walk with God here 
 and not walk with God over there. 
 
 It Was No Miracle 
 
 I have often said that it was no miracle that 
 John Muir was what he was. Indeed, it would 
 have been a miracle if he had not been what he 
 was. It is the same with Luther Burbank. It 
 is the same with Joan of Arc. It is the same 
 with any great character. They are molded in 
 youth. If they walk with God in youth, they 
 
MUIR AND THE MASTER 177 
 
 will walk with God through life, and then in 
 turn they will walk with him when the walking 
 is along the celestial ways. 
 
 I have been told by Luther Burbank himself 
 that one of the first toys that he had to play 
 with, when he was a child seven years old, was 
 a cactus plant. He kept this plant a long time. 
 It was to him what a dog is to most boys or a 
 doll to a girl child. It was his to care for and 
 to water and to love. It is a singular thing 
 that, later in life, it was with this very plant 
 that he was to make one of his greatest contri- 
 butions to humanity. As one reads the life of 
 Joan of Arc he finds that she "listened to God 
 talk," and, because she listened to God talk, she 
 led her nation out of its bondage and made her- 
 self unconsciously one of the greatest heroines 
 of all time. John Muir had a strange experi- 
 ence when he was a boy. 
 
 From Scotland to Wisconsin in his early 
 years his playworld was out of doors. The 
 birds and animals of home and the woods and 
 the fields were his playfellows. During a long 
 overland trip to Wisconsin John Muir lived out 
 of doors, hunted, learned to love the trees, the 
 fields, the mountains, the prairies, and the in- 
 habitants thereof — ^under the ground and above 
 the ground — as he loved nothing else on earth. 
 
178 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 With the particular early experiences that John 
 Muir had, with the particular early experiences 
 that Luther Burbank had, with the particular 
 early influences of Joan of Arc's life it seems 
 to me that it would have been a miracle if they 
 had been anything other than what they were 
 when they grew in years and stature. 
 
 One night as they were crossing the Amer- 
 ican continent there appeared a particularly 
 beautiful auroral light of wonderful colors. 
 The old Scotch father, calling the family to 
 come outside said to them: "Come! Come, 
 mother! Come, bairns! and see the glory of 
 God. All the sky is clad in a robe of red light. 
 Look straight up to the crown where the robes 
 are gathered. Hush, and wonder and adore, 
 for surely this is the clothing of the Lord him- 
 self, and perhaps he will even now appear look- 
 ing down from his high heavens." What lad 
 could live under such a reverent father and 
 atmosphere and not learn to see God through 
 nature and not learn to love both ? 
 
 When I talked with Mr. Burbank of John 
 Muir, his great friend, he kept saying over and 
 over : "John Muir was a great man ; John Muir 
 was more than that : he was a good man. John 
 Muir was a great man ; he was more than that : 
 he was a good man !" 
 
MUIR AND THE MASTER 179 
 
 John Muir's Reverence for God 
 
 In a wonderful chapter on "The Water- 
 Ousel" he tells of that beautiful little water- 
 bird; of how it lives in the outposts of nature 
 all alone; of how it inhabits the far-flung 
 glaciers, cold and bleak and desolate; of how it 
 darts in and out and under and through the 
 densest falls ; of how it flies in ice-caverns with- 
 out a spot of light; of how he has found them 
 from Mexico to Alaska, and then adds with 
 reverence : "And throughout the whole of their 
 beautiful lives they interpret all that we in our 
 unbelief call terrible in the utterances of tor- 
 rents and storms, as only varied expressions of 
 God's eternal love." 
 
 One day in Alaska, when he was studying a 
 glacier that was later named for him (as has 
 been a beautiful forest of redwoods near San 
 Francisco), he was particularly impressed, 
 and, following a vivid and scintillating descrip- 
 tion of the blue and gleaming ice of the glacier, 
 he says, "We rejoiced in the possession of so 
 blessed a day, and came away with a feeling 
 that in very foundational truth we had been in 
 one of God's own temples and had seen him and 
 heard him working and preaching like a man." 
 
 He speaks of a scene in Alaska when he and 
 
i8o OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 Mr. Young met a new tribe, and after the 
 missionary had spoken Mr. Muir was asked to 
 speak. He told them of the brotherhood of 
 man and the Fatherhood of God, and an old 
 chief in replying said: "I have often been 
 caught in a storm and held in camp until there 
 was nothing to eat, but when I reached home 
 and got warm and had a good meal, then my 
 body felt good. For a long time my heart has 
 been hungry and cold, but to-night your words 
 have warmed my heart, and given it a good 
 meal, and now my heart feels good." 
 
 He tells with deep reverence a story of a 
 living example of the atonement which he 
 heard of among the Indians of Alaska. An old 
 chief sacrificed himself for his tribe. 
 
 There had been a war all summer between 
 two strong tribes. Fall had come and the war 
 was not settled. One old chief saw that, unless 
 it stopped soon and his people had a chance to 
 lay in their winter supply of berries and 
 salmon, they would starve, so he went out under 
 a truce flag to ask the chief of the other tribe to 
 stop and go home, telling him the reason for 
 this request. 
 
 The other chief said that his tribe would not 
 stop fighting because ten more of his men had 
 been killed than of the enemy's. Then the chief 
 
MUIR AND THE MASTER i8i 
 
 said to him: "You know that I am a chief. I 
 am worth ten of your men. Kill me in place of 
 them and let us have peace." 
 
 This sacrificial request was granted, and 
 there in front of the contending tribes the old 
 chief was shot. 
 
 When Mr. Young and Mr. Muir came to this 
 tribe they told them the story and then added : 
 "Yes, your words are good. The Son of God, 
 the Chief of chiefs, the Maker of all the world, 
 must be worth more than all mankind put to- 
 gether; therefore, when his blood was shed the 
 salvation of the world was made sure." 
 
 One of his most burning descriptions is that 
 of the morning that he discovered Glacier Bay. 
 It was a supreme hour even in this great man's 
 eventful life, when glaciers, and giant trees, 
 and triumphant moments on mountain peaks at 
 the top of the world were everyday experiences 
 with him. I think that I have seldom seen him 
 so moved as he was on this tremendous day. 
 
 He speaks of the calm dawn, the frosty clear- 
 ness of the morning, the brooding stillness ; and 
 amid this stillness the thunder of new-born ice- 
 bergs ; of the fact that they did not see the sun- 
 rise because they were beneath the ice-cliffs; 
 then of the sudden appearance of a red light 
 burning with a strange splendor, an unearthly 
 
i82 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 splendor, from the top of the utmost peak. Then 
 he tells of how this Hght began to spread over 
 everything until the "whole range of ice peaks 
 was illuminated with this strange red glow like 
 a crimson, furred Alpin glow." 
 
 "We turned away from that scene, joining 
 the outgoing bergs, while 'Gloria in excelsis' 
 still seemed to be sounding over all the white 
 landscape, and our burning hearts were ready 
 for any fate, feeling that, whatever the future 
 might have in store, the treasuries we had 
 gained this glorious morning would enrich our 
 lives forever." 
 
 His strange sympathy with all things that 
 breathe and live is illustrated with the story of 
 a school of great whales that he saw once. One 
 seldom thinks to waste any sympa:thy on a 
 whale. One has a feeling that a whale is big 
 enough to take care of itself in any and all 
 weather. But as John Muir watched this great 
 school of monsters he makes a comment that 
 for sheer warm-heartedness I think seldom has 
 been equaled. His heart was even big enough 
 to take in a school of whales. It was said of 
 Lincoln that "his heart was as big as the world, 
 but there was no room in it for the memory of 
 a single wrong." And so I might say that the 
 heart of John Muir was as big as the world; 
 
MUIR AND THE MASTER 183 
 
 and there was room in it not only for moun- 
 tains, and seas and giant sequoias, and tiny 
 flowers, and mountain sheep, and Shasta Uhes, 
 and tiny snow flowers, and Ousel birds, but 
 there was room in it for a poor lumbering 
 leviathan of the seas : 
 
 "But think of the hearts of those whales, 
 beating warm against the sea, day and night, 
 through dark and light, on and on for cen- 
 turies ; how the red blood must gush and gurgle 
 in and out, bucketfuls, barrelfuls at a beat !" 
 
 His sense of humor was keen and he knew 
 how to express it with a flashing sentence. He 
 was describing a deserted mining camp in 
 California. There was little left of what had 
 once been a flourishing city in the old days. A 
 tall chimney still remained with mining 
 machinery rusted and ruined. Coyotes 
 wandered unmolested through the city streets, 
 "and of all the busy throng that had so lavishly 
 spent their time and money here only one man 
 remains — a lone bachelor with one suspender." 
 
 Where can be found a more vivid, a shorter, 
 sharper picture of a drip of water "petering 
 out to a dribble at the end" than that phrase, 
 "a lone bachelor with one suspender"? 
 
 And then he shoots this striking epigram. 
 It is illustrative of another tremendous lesson he 
 
i84 OUTDOOR MEN AND MINDS 
 
 learned from nature: "But, after all, effort, 
 however misapplied, is better than stagnation. 
 Better toil blindly, beating every stone in turn 
 for grains of gold, whether they contain any or 
 not, than lie down in apathetic decay." 
 
 And so this great out-of-doors man of the 
 mountains learned, even amid earthly 'things, to 
 walk with God. Nature was his great school- 
 house, but he did not stop at that schoolhouse. 
 He went on into the High School of Humanity. 
 And in that high school he found a host of 
 friends who forever clung to him because they 
 loved him and found him a true Christian 
 gentleman at heart; and finally he passed on 
 into the College of God's Communion, and for- 
 ever there he shall walk and talk, and study 
 and dream and sketch and learn and love and 
 live through eternity. When he walked up the 
 mountains he never walked away from God. 
 His face was always turned toward the Creator 
 of all the wonders and beauties that he saw, and 
 he never failed to give God credit for his handi- 
 work. He knew whence it had come. 
 
^ .y^