The poorest man in London is as welcome to look up as the richest, and he is just as able to do it. The poorest man in London, even in the roar and din and hurly-burly of the London streets, can lift up his eyes, and his heart with his eyes, to the silence that is in the starry sky. But you need to do it. The stars will not come to us. There they are in all their majesty, telling of the glory of God; but we have to lift up our eyes, and gaze upon the stars, and greet them, and get their message. And, my friend, as long as you are going to give in, and bow your head like the bulrush, and refuse to lift up your soul to the eternal ranges of truth and help that are there, you will never be a bit better than you are, and you do not deserve to be. How many people are ever sighing and moping when there is no real need for it. It can all be altered; and this does it: " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." I will do it. I will compel my soul to forget the things of time and sense that are round about me, and I shall look up. You have heard of the man who dreamed that he had fallen into a pit, and, when he was lying there helpless, he thought that he saw a star, and, strange to say, in his dream as he fastened his eyes on the star he felt himself begin to rise, and, whenever that star got dim to him, down he came again. That is wonderfully like the Christian. We rise by looking up. Look up. Keep steadily looking up; and while you look up you rise and rise into the upper air and atmosphere of light, and purity, and peace. But, if you keep looking round about and keep looking in, you are down, and you will be down.

There is some

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills." thing in the hills. We who belong to the Highland hills know what preachers of sermons the hills are. come down to England it is just about the one thing we

miss. I like you well. I like your town.
I mean to stay here. But your country
This is one of its great drawbacks to me.

When we

God helping me,

is

awfully flat.

I cannot get a

.

hill; the most of them I seem to be able to look over. I like to get a look at a big mountain. Why, sometime ago I was travelling in a train away there about Cheshire somewhere, and suddenly outside of the carriage-window I saw a great mountain, and I gave a cry that made the people look at me. I suppose, that it was Snowdon away in the distance, and I could not refrain. What a sight! What a power these hills have! When I was at Margate, spending eight or ten days, a man came up to me who had known me, or met me somewhere. He was a Swiss, and, in his broken English, he gave me such a long discourse, putting out his hands, and preaching with his fingers and his legs as well as with his tongue, telling me about the Swiss mountains, and how the Swiss mountains told upon him; and he could never stay long here, although he lives here, and has been here for forty years, and has picked up a fortune from between the feet of you English people. He has been here forty years, and he has picked up a fortune, but he says, "Every little while I must go back to those hills." He feels as if his soul would die unless he got away into some Alpine valley, and lost himself in its magnificence. And he is not a Christian. No; I soon found him out there. I mentioned the 121st Psalm, and I said, "Does God live on the top of your hills?" Ah! it was a pity that he was not a Christian, was it not? For, after all, it is not the hills, but it is this thought that comes along with them,

They seem to lift me up nearer to God, and bring God nearer to me. I do not know how much stimulus I got. in Edinburgh from them when I was studying my sermons on the Saturdays. You know, I am not a methodical man, any way. Maybe, it is to my disadvantage; but I was not built that way from the start. I was always harum-scarum.

Even at home, when I was a boy, I never could be taught to put a thing in the right place and go back there and get it. Well, as a student and minister I have been very much the same. At all events, I do things in my own way; and in studying my sermons at Edinburgh, I was not sitting down amid books, tearing my hair, and writing things on a paper. I used to go to the back of the house, where I could see Arthur's Seat, a hill with a wonderful resemblance to a great lion. I have been out there Saturday after Saturday, with my head as empty as possible--and you know how empty your head can be. I have gone out there, and the hill has spoken to me. When I got nervous and timid under the influence of the things of time, I used to get out, and there was the great big Scottish lion, and he seemed to look over at me, and say, "Why, you are shaking again, you are troubled again. You are nervous again. Oh, poor, poor, little creature! Look at me. See how the winds have blown, and the rains have battered against me. See how, night and day, and years through, and whole centuries on end, I have borne the whole stress and conflict of every kind of weather and vicissitude; and here I am, strong and rooted, stable and secure." I used to let that hill talk to me after that fashion, and I would go back into the study, and say, "The hills are right; they have but one great, grand message. I am all right, too, if I would only believe in God Almighty." "As the mountains stand round about Jerusalem, so- How do the mountains stand? They stand for ever. Men live and wax great and grow old and die, but the mountains there are the same as ever. So the Lord is the strength of His people, and stands round about them for ever and for ever. Look up! Lift up your eyes to the hills.

"

Again: Sometimes I went out to my back green, and Arthur's Seat was not there: the hill was not there. Why? Well, you know in Edinburgh there are mists. haze comes up from the German Ocean beyond from Leith,

behind the cloud. God is there, as We have to stay,

and it just strikes Arthur Seat, that great big hill, and it coils itself round about its head, and it spreads away over its great, gigantic sides; and you may come out, and there is no hill there. But that never troubled me. I looked there and did not see it, but I always had sense enough to understand that, although for the minute it was not seen, it was in below that veil of cloud. It was there as green, and solid, and big as ever. So, for a moment, there may be clouds between me and God. But, notwithstanding the clouds, I know that He is there. Now, some of us are forgetting it. Because there is a cloud between us, we forget that God is there below the cloud, and It is a mere question of earth and time. strong, and loving, and almighty as ever. and strengthen, and counsel our hearts in Him. Ah! it would be an awful thing if we lifted our eyes to the hills, and, lo! the great Grampians were gone. What a sight that would be gone, not merely covered with clouds. I wonder whether that is what David thought when he penned the second verse. He is a step higher this time: "My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." Yes; I am not mistaken. Some of you thought, perhaps, I was mistaken and had forgotten. I may live to the day, and so may you-it may be to-morrow morning, or it may be before we sleep-when the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, and all this world pass away like a flaming scroll. And where then will be our help in that day when the mountains stagger and reel like drunken men? David seems almost to have thought of that, and he says in the second verse, "My help in that awful hour will be where it always was. In that rocking, reeling, tremendous hour I shall be as stable, and calm, and steadfast as ever I was. My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." From no created source did the Psalmist's strength come, but from God, the ever-flowing fountain. Oh, my hearer, let me press it upon you. Where is your strength?

If

Where is your light? Where is your joy? If it is only in
earth and time, and the things of earth and time, is it any
wonder that life is so up and down as it is?
you would know what it is to be strong and stead-
fast in the midst of the chances and changes of this earthly
scene, begin to-night to be a true Christian. Then
your soul is drinking from a source that can never, never,
to eternity's end, run dry. "My help cometh from the
Lord, which made heaven and earth." It is easy to say.
How many of us will be the better for it to-morrow, or as
we go home to-night? All creation, every created being, is
simply another certificate to you of the presence and power
of your redeemer God, the very firmness of the road beneath
you being but a parable of the splendid firmness of the hand
that for ever will uphold you. That is the use to make of

nature.

"He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber." I wonder whether the Psalmist is still thinking of mountains and mountainclimbing. "He will not suffer thy foot to be moved." Any of you who have tried to climb the hills know that that is just the great danger of it. One slip, and you may go sheer down hundreds of feet, and be dashed to pieces. Do we not use this expression to cover the idea of safety? We talk about the "sure-footed" guide, and the footed" mountaineer, the man of keen eye and cool nerve, and of muscles like iron all over his body; a man who can be depended on. If he gets a foothold for his foot, he will

sure

put his foot there, and keep it there, until he gets another as good. So is the Christian. Why, in one sense, we are engaged in a perilous journey. We are going up. We are climbing. To brace yourself to climb the Matterhorn is a small thing compared with this girding of your mind to be sober and climbing right up from hell to heaven. And that is the climb for every one of us. And I think that it was out of that idea of hill-climbing that David brings in this

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