RELIGIOUS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3767, 4 June 1907, Page 4

RELIGIOUS.

THK KTKRNAL SNOWS. Uv A H;iulu'r. Amongst the varied recreations which help to give zest to life, invigorating and exhilarating both to the mind and the body, with some of the most pleasurable of all is a ramble, alpenstock in hand, midst the savage gorges and wild ravines and defiles, the winding glaciers, and the snowy plateaux and wastes of the Pyrenees or the Alps. Commencing’ the ascent the explorer is soon in the land of flowers ; beautiful columbines, yellow' foxgloves, blue mountain gentian, pink alpenroses, with many another fair beauty of the floral world. Leaving these natural parterres, and still ascending upwards through a forest of spruce, the dense leafage causing a perpetual gloom, the path now winds amidst detached rocks and boulders, until at Inegth a wide and deep fissure, rent in the mountain, is reached. Lofty beetling cliffs and dark frowning precipices bound this yawming gorge, through which a mountain torrrent foams and eddies, now plunging headlong over a precipice or now 7 swirling and splashing amidst the many obstructions in its course ; while here and there are piled up in wild confusion masses of jagged, broken rock, upon wdiich doubtless in former times graceful chamois disported themselves until exterminated by ruthless hunters. But excelsior, excelsior; higher, and yet higher. Now the eternal snow's are reached; domes and hummocks and wide outspread plateaux of perpetual snow, glistening and sparkling in the brilliant sun, its dazzling whiteness contrasting sharply with the dark rocky peaks and towering craigs and escarpments upreared beyond. Crossing the crisp snowy waste and now' descending, the upper reaches of the glacier come into view'; and, still descending, the explorer is soon on the rugged, broken ice. Now a deep crevasse is passed, its cleft sides a glorious blue-green ; now a cluster of icepillars and broken shafts and columns ; or now a grotesquely shaped mass of piled up broken ice welded together with frozen snow 7 .

At length the vallej' is again reached, and a contemplation of all the w'ild and rugged beauty and of all the sublimity and stately grandeur of this mountain scenery must lead the thoughts “ to look from nature up to nature’s God.” And He who endowed this earth of ours with such lavish beauty has provided a means by w'hich any who w'ill may inherit a realm of far surpassing glory, and He has told us in His Holy scriptures that the means to attain that inheritance is through faith in the Saviour of the w'orld wdio, for us, Himself endured the chastisement demanded for sin byKternal Justice.