So let us hope that those institutions of pride and cruelty, which are
colder than the glacier, and equally vast and hopeless in their
apparent magnitude, may yet, like that, be slowly and surely passing
away. Like the silent warfare of the sun on the glacier, is that
overshadowing presence of Jesus, whose power, so still, yet so
resistless, is now being felt through all the moving earth.
Those defiant waves of death-cold ice might as well hope to conquer
the calm, silent sun, as the old, frozen institutions of human
selfishness to resist the influence which he is now breathing through
the human heart, to liberate the captive, to free the slave, and to
turn the ice of long winters into rivers of life for the new heaven
and the new earth.
All this we know is coming, but we long to see it now, and breathe
forth our desires with the Hebrew prophet, "O that thou wouldst rend
the heavens, that thou wouldst come down, that the mountains might
flow down at thy presence."
I had, while upon this field of ice, that strange feeling which often
comes over one, at the sight of a thing unusually beautiful and
sublime, of wanting, in some way, to appropriate and make it a part of
myself.
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