O UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS, we learn to love you more with each
passing year. We learn that you are cruel only to be kind. We learn
that you are saving us from ourselves. But O, how most of us must be
bumped to see this!
I know no better way to close this lecture than to tell you of a great
bump that struck me one morning in Los Angeles. It seemed as tho twelve
years of my life had dropped out of it, and had been lost.
Were you ever bumped so hard you were numb? I was numb. I wondered why
I was living. I thought I had nothing more to live for. When a dog is
wounded he crawls away alone to lick his wounds. I felt like the
wounded dog. I wanted to crawl away to lick my wounds.
That is why I climbed Mount Lowe that day. I wanted to get alone.
It is a wonderful experience to climb Mount Lowe. The tourists go up
half a mile into Rubio Canyon, to the engineering miracle, the
triangular car that hoists them out of the hungry chasm thirty-five
hundred feet up the side of a granite cliff, to the top of Echo
Mountain.
Here they find that Echo Mountain is but a shelf on the side of Mount
Lowe. Here they take an electric car that winds five miles on towards
the sky. There is hardly a straight rail in the track. Every minute a
new thrill, and no two thrills alike. Five miles of winding and
squirming, twisting and ducking, dodging and summersaulting.
There are places where the tourist wants to grasp his seat and lift.
There is a wooden shelf nailed to the side of the perpendicular
rockwall where his life depends upon the honesty of the man who drove
the nails. He may wonder if the man was working by the day or by the
job! He looks over the edge of the shelf downward, and then turns to
the other side to look at the face of the cliff they are hugging, and
discovers there is no place to resign!
The car is five thousand feet high where it stops on that last shelf,
Alpine Tavern. One cannot ride farther upward. This is not the summit,
but just where science surrenders. There is a little trail that winds
upward from Alpine Tavern to the summit. It is three miles long and
rises eleven hundred feet.
To go up that last eleven hundred feet and stand upon the flat rock at
the summit of Mount Lowe is to get a picture so wonderful it cannot be
described with this poor human vocabulary. It must be lived. On a pure,
clear day one looks down this sixty-one hundred feet, more than a mile,
into the orange belt of Southern California. It spreads out below in
one great mosaic of turquoise and amber and emerald, where the miles
seem like inches, and where his field-glass sweeps one panoramic
picture of a hundred miles or more.
Just below is Pasadena and Los Angeles. To the westward perhaps forty
miles is the blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean, on westward the faint
outlines of Catalina Islands. The ocean seems so close one could throw
a pebble over into it. How a mountain does reduce distances. You throw
the pebble and it falls upon your toes!
And Mount Lowe is but a shelf on the side of the higher Sierras. The
granite mountains rise higher to the northward, and to the east rises
"Old Baldy," twelve thousand feet high and snow eternally on his head.
This is one of the workshops of the infinite!
All alone I scrambled up that three-mile trail to the summit. All alone
I stood upon the flat rock at the summit and looked down into the
swimming distances. I did not know why I had struggled up into that
mountain sanctuary, for I was not searching for sublimity. I was
searching for relief. I was heartsick.
I saw clouds down in the valley below me. I had never before looked
down upon clouds. I thought of the cloud that had covered me in the
valley below, and dully watched the clouds spread wider and blacker.
Afterwhile the valley was all hidden by the clouds. I knew rain must be
falling down there. The people must be saying, "The sun doesn't shine.
The sky is all gone." But I saw the truth—the sun was shining. The sky
was in place. A cloud had covered down over that first mile. The sun
was shining upon me, the sky was all blue over me, and there were
millions of miles of sunshine above me. I could see all this because I
had gone above the valley. I could see above the clouds.
A great light seemed to break over my stormswept soul. I am under the
clouds of trouble today, BUT THE SUN IS SHINING!
I must go on up the mountain to see it.
The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my
sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how
black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path,
I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and
God forever in His heavens.
Each day as I go up the mountain I get a larger vision. The miles that
seem so great down in the valley, seem so small as I look down upon
them from higher up. Each day as I look back I see more clearly the
plan of a human life. The rocks, the curves and the struggles fit into
a divine engineering plan to soften the steepness of the ascent. The
bumps are lifts. The things that seem so important down in the smudgy,
stormswept valley, seem so unimportant as we go higher up the mountain
to more important things.
Today I look back to the bump that sent me up Mount Lowe. I did not see
how I could live past that bump. The years have passed and I now know
it was one of the greatest blessings of my life. It closed one gate,
but it opened another gate to a better pathway up the mountain.
Late that day I was clambering down the side of Mount Lowe. Down in the
valley below me I saw shadows. Then I looked over into the southwest
and I could see the sun going down. I could see him sink lower and
lower until his red lips kissed the cheek of the Pacific. The glory of
the sunset filled sea and sky with flames of gold and fountains of
rainbows. Such a sunset from the mountain-side is a promise of heaven.
The shadows of sunset widened over the valley. Presently all the valley
was black with the shadow. It was night down there. The people were
saying, "The sun doesn't shine." But it was not night where I stood. I
was farther up the mountain. I turned and looked up to the summit. The
beams of the setting sun were yet gilding Mount Lowe's summit. It was
night down in the valley, but it was day on the mountain top!
Go on south!
That means, go on up!
Child of humanity, are you in the storm? Go on upward. Are you in the
night? Go on upward.
For the peace and the light are always above the storm and the night,
and always in our reach.
I am going on upward. Take my hand and let us go together. Mount Lowe
showed the way that dark day. There I heard the "sermons in stones."
Some day my night will come. It will spread over all this valley of
material things where the storms have raged.
But I shall be on the mountain top. I shall look down upon the night,
as I am learning to climb and look down upon the storms. I shall be in
the new day of the mountain-top, forever above the night.
I shall find this mountain-top just another shelf on the side of the
Mountain of Infinite Unfolding. I shall have risen perhaps only the
first mile. I shall have millions of miles yet to rise.
This will be another Commencement Day and Master's Degree. Infinite the
number on up. "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him."
We are not growing old. We are going up to Eternal Life.
Rejoice and Go Upward!
