le pines. Two of the days that I was
permitted to enjoy there were Sundays. On one of them I passed
several hours of the afternoon in listening, alone, to the
murmur of the pines, while the waves were gently beating the
shore with their restlessness. If the beauty and purity of the
Lake were in harmony with the deepest religion of the Bible,
certainly the voice of the pines was also in chord with it.

* * * * *

I read under the pines of Lake Tahoe, on that Sunday
afternoon, some pages from a recent English work that raises
the question of inspiration. Is the Bible the word of God,
or the words of men? It is neither. It is the word of God
breathed through the words of men, inextricably intertwined
with them as the tone of the wind with the quality of the
tree. We must go to the Bible as to a grove of evergreens, not
asking for cold, clear truth, but for sacred influence, for
revival to the devout sentiment, for the
breath of the Holy Ghost, not as it wanders in pure space, but
as it sweeps through cedars and pines.

* * * * *

In my Sunday musing by the shore of our Lake, I raised the
question,--Who were looking upon the waters of Tahoe when
Jesus walked by the beach of Gennesareth? Did men look upon
it then? And if so were they above the savage level, and could
they appreciate its beauty? And before the time of Christ,
before the date of Adam, however far back we may be obliged
to place our ancestor, for what purpose was this luxuriance
of color, this pomp of garniture? How few human eyes have yet
rested upon it in calmness, to drink in its loveliness! There
are spots near the point of the shore where the hotel stands,
to which not more than a few score intelligent visitors
have yet been introduced. Such a nook I was taken to by a
cultivated friend. We sailed ten miles on the water to the
mouth of a mountain stream that pours foaming into its
green expanse. We left the boat, followed this stream by its
downward leaps through uninvaded nature for more than a mile,
and found that it flows from a smaller lake, not more than
three miles in circuit, which lies directly at the base of
two tremendous peaks of the Sierra, white with immense and
perpetual snow-fields. The same ring of vivid green, the same