Ah, friends,--and brothers in both the meannesses and the great expectations of this strange finite, infinite existence,--how we need, how we need, these periodical ascents into Higher ground! How large life is; and yet, how little! How we fret and fume about fields and hedges--merest trifles, when counties and hills--nay, continents and seas--nay, worlds or systems, and space, might lie under the ken of our perception and contemplation, which, indeed, has no bounds, forward, through eternal time, and infinite space! How, in the littleness of things, are we apt to swamp the largeness which they might present to our thought! How life’s pettinesses overmaster the mighty tremendous prospect that God has set before us, looming indeed through a veil of mist, far below our feet! Oh, how grand, how stupendous, how magnificent, might this our life, rightly thought of, become! Money, love, fame, power; it is, while we stand on the mountain, the tinkle of a sheep-bell far below us in the valley; it is the pigmy form, it is the muffled cry of those things which seemed to us large and of full growth, when we met them down far below in the bustle and busy intercourse of life. I think of Martha, with the ordering of a meal the great matter in her eyes; Mary, indeed at the Saviour’s feet, but thus seated, placed, in good truth, upon a mountain, from whose wide range of view all merely of this world seemed petty, worthless, mean. Oh, for a mountain view of life! Oh, for an angel’s view! Then money, power, talents, influence, all would be noble, as offerings to Christ; contemptible in any other aspect. How I crave to take always that standing-point; to survey life--so far as such as I am can--from God’s point of sight; to look at time as, after all, only a tooth in the great cog-wheel of Eternity, as something very small, that fits into something very large! The littleness of life; its scandals, its jealousies, its irritations, its safe voyages or its wrecks, its gains or losses of a fast-flying hour; its loves and hopes, its hates and despairs, its ecstasies and anguishes; these are the fields and hedges that are perceived no longer, when we have ascended above this brief and transient state of things, and look down upon counties, continents, worlds.