175. The Snow
The Snow
Job_38:22 : ’93Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?’94
Grossly maligned is the season of winter. The spring and summer and autumn have had many admirers; but winter, hoary-headed and white-bearded winter, hath had more enemies than friends. Yet without winter the human race would be inane and effortless. You might speak of the winter as the mother of tempests; but I take it as the father of a whole family of physical, mental and spiritual energies. Most of the people that I know are strong in proportion to the number of snowbanks they had to climb over, or push through, in childhood, while their fathers drove the sled loaded with logs through the crunching drifts high as the fences. At the season of the year when we are so familiar with the snow’97those frozen vapors, those falling blossoms of the sky, those white angels of the atmosphere, those poems of the storm, those Iliads and Odysseys of the wintry tempest’97I turn over the leaves of my Bible and, though most of it was written in a clime where snow seldom or never fell’97I find many references to these beautiful congelations. Though the writers may seldom or never have felt the cold touch of the snowflake on their cheek, they had in sight two mountains, the tops of which were suggestive. Other kings sometimes take off their crowns, but Lebanon and Mount Hermon all the year round and through the ages never lift the coronets of crystal from their foreheads. The first time we find a deep fall of snow in the Bible is where Samuel describes a fight between Benaiah and a lion in a pit; and though the snow may have crimsoned under the wounds of both man and brute, the shaggy monster rolled over dead and the giant was victor. But the snow is not fully recognized in the Bible until God interrogates Job, the scientist, concerning its wonders, saying: ’93Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?’94
I rather think that Job may have examined the snowflake with a microscope; for, although it is supposed that the microscope was invented long after Job’92s time, there had been wonders of glass long before the microscope and telescope of later days were thought of. So long ago as when the Coliseum was in its full splendor, Nero sat in the emperor’92s box of that great theatre, which held a hundred thousand people, and looked at the combatants through a gem in his finger-ring which brought everything close up to his eye. Four hundred years before Christ, in the stores at Athens, were sold powerful glasses called ’93burning spheres,’94 and Layard, the explorer, found a magnifying glass amid the ruins of Nineveh, and in the palace of Nimrod. Whether through magnifying instrument or with unaided eye, I cannot say, but I am sure that Job somehow went through the galleries of the snowflake and counted its pillars and found wonders, raptures, mysteries, theologies, majesties, infinities walking up and down its corridors, as a result of the question which the Lord had asked him, ’93Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?’94
Oh, it is a wondrous meteor! Humboldt studied it in the Andes twelve thousand feet above the level of the sea. De Saussure reveled among these meteors in the Alps and Dr. Scoresby counted ninety-six varieties of snowflake amid the Arctics. They are in shape of stars, in shape of coronets, in shape of cylinders; are globular, are hexagonal, are pyramidal, are castellated. After a fresh fall of snow, in one walk you crush under your feet Tuileries, Windsor Castles, St. Pauls, St. Peters, St. Marks Cathedrals, Alhambras and Sydenham Palaces innumerable. I know it depends much on your own condition what impression these flying meteors of the snow make. I shall not forget two rough and unpretending wood-cuts which I saw in my boyhood, side by side’97one picture of a prosperous farmhouse, with all signs of comfort, and a lad, warmly clothed, looking out of the door upon the first flurry of snow, and his mind no doubt filled with the sound of jingling sleigh-bells, and the frolic with playfellows in the deep banks, and he clapping his hands and shouting: ’93It snows! It snows!’94 The other sketch was of a boy, haggard and hollow-eyed with hunger, looking from the broken door of a wretched home, and seeing in the falling flakes prophecy of more cold and less bread and greater privation, wringing his hands and with tears rolling down his wan cheeks, crying: ’93Oh, my God! It snows! It snows!’94 Out of the abundance that characterizes most of our homes may there go speedy relief to all whom winter finds in want and exposure!
And now I propose for your spiritual and everlasting profit, if you will accept my guidance, to take you through some of these wonders of crystallization. And notice, first, God in the littles. You may take alpenstock and cross the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, and ascend Mont Blanc, which rises into the clouds like a pillar of the Great White Throne, or with Arctic explorer ascend the mountains around the North Pole and see glaciers a thousand feet high grinding against glaciers three thousand feet high. But I will take you on a less pretentious journey and show you God in the snowflake. There is room enough between its pillars for the great Jehovah to stand. In that one frozen drop on the tip of your finger, you may find the throne-room of the Almighty. I take up the snow in my hand and see the coursers of celestial dominion pawing these crystal pavements. The telescope is grand, but I must confess that I am quite as much interested in the microscope. The one reveals the universe above us; the other, just as great a universe beneath us. But the telescope overwhelms me, while the microscope comforts me. What you want and I want especially is a God in littles. If we were seraphic or archangelic in our natures, we would want to study God in the great; but such small, weak, shortlived beings as you and I are, want to find God in the littles.
When I see the Maker of the universe giving himself to the architecture of a snowflake and making its shafts, its domes, its curves, its walls, its irradiations so perfect, I conclude he will look after our insignificant affairs. And if we are of more value than a sparrow, most certainly we are of infinitely greater value than an inanimate snowflake. So the Bible would chiefly impress us with God in the littles. It does not say, ’93Consider the clouds,’94 but it says, ’93Consider the lilies.’94 It does not say, ’93Behold the tempests!’94 but ’93Behold the fowls!’94 and it applauds a cup of cold water, and the widow’92s two mites, and says the hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear, therefore, that you are going to be lost in the crowd. Do not think that because you estimate yourself as only one snowflake among a three-days’92 January snowstorm that you will be forgotten. The birth and death of a drop of chilled vapor is as certainly regarded by the Lord as the creation and demolition of a planet. Nothing is big to God and nothing is small. What makes the honey industries of South Carolina such a source of livelihood and wealth? It is because God teaches the ladybug to make an opening in the rind of the apricot for the bee, who cannot otherwise get at the juices of the fruit. So God sends the ladybug ahead to prepare the way for the honeybee. He teaches the ant to bite each grain of corn that she puts in the ground for winter food, in order that it may not take root and so ruin the little granary. He teaches the raven in dry weather to throw pebbles into a hollow tree, that the water far down and out of reach may come up within the reach of the bird’92s beak. What a comfort that he is a God in littles! The emperor of all the Russians in olden time was looking at a map spread before him of his vast dominions, and he could not find Great Britain on the map, and he called in his secretary and said: ’93Where is Great Britain that I hear so much about?’94 ’93It is under your thumb,’94 said the secretary; and the emperor raised his hand from the map and saw the country he was looking for. And it is high time that we find this mighty realm of God close by and under our little finger. To drop you out of his memory would be to resign his omniscience. To refuse you his protection would be to abdicate his omnipotence. When you tell me that he is the God of Jupiter and the God of Mercury and the God of Saturn, you tell me something so vast that I cannot comprehend it. But if you tell me he is the God of the snowflake, you tell me something I can hold and measure and realize. Thus the smallest snowflake contains a jewel-case of comfort. Here is an opal, an amethyst, a diamond. Here is one of the treasures of the snow. Take it for your present and everlasting comfort.
Behold, also, in the snow the treasure of accumulated power. During a snowstorm let an apothecary accustomed to weigh most delicate quantities, hold his weighing scales out of the window and let one flake fall on the surface of the scales and it will not even make it tremble. When you want to express extreme triviality of weight you say, ’93Light as a feather;’94 but a snowflake is much lighter. It is just twenty-four times lighter than water. And yet the accumulation of these flakes once broke down, in sight of my house, six telegraph poles, made helpless police and fire departments, and halted rail-trains with two thundering locomotives. We have already learned so much of the power of electricity that we have become careful how we touch the electric wire, and in many cases a touch has been death. But the snow puts its hand on many of these wires and tears them down as though they were cobwebs. The snow says, ’93You seem afraid of the thunderbolt; I will catch it and hurl it to the ground. Your boasted electric lights adorning your cities with bubbles of fire, I will put out as easily as your ancestors snuffed out a tallow candle.’94 The snow puts its finger on the lips of our cities that are talking with each other and they relapse into silence, uttering not a word. The snow mightier than the lightning!
In March, 1888, the snow stopped America. It said to Brooklyn, ’93Stay home!’94 to New York, ’93Stay home!’94 to Philadelphia, ’93Stay home!’94 to Washington, ’93Stay home!’94 to Richmond, ’93Stay home!’94 It put into a white sepulchre most of this nation. Commerce, whose wheels never stopped before, stopped then. What was the matter? Power of accumulated snowflakes. On the top of the Appenines one flake falls, and others fall, and they pile up, and they make a mountain of fleece on the top of a mountain of rock, until one day a gust of wind, or even the voice of a mountaineer, sets the frozen vapors into action and by awful descent they sweep everything in their course’97trees, rocks, villages’97as when, in 1827, the town of Briel in Valois was buried, and in 1624, in Switzerland, three hundred soldiers were entombed. These avalanches were made up of single snowflakes. What tragedies of the snow have been witnessed by the monks of St. Bernard, who, for ages have with the dogs been busy in extricating bewildered and overwhelmed travelers in Alpine storms, the dogs with blankets fastened to their backs and flasks of spirits fastened to their necks, to resuscitate the helpless travelers’97one of these dogs decorated with a medal for having saved the lives of twenty-two persons, the brave beast himself slain of the snow on that day when accompanying a Piedmontese courier on the way to his anxious household down the mountain, the wife and children of the Piedmontese coming up the mountain in search of him, an avalanche covered all under pyramids higher than those under which the Egyptian monarchs sleep their sleep of the ages. Snowslides of our own Northwest, many perishing by them every spring; snowslides on Alaskan glaciers, forever entombing the unfortunate gold-seekers; the melting snows flooding our great rivers, till they overleap their banks and carry destruction and death through entire counties along the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio and the Arkansas. What an illustration of the tragedies of the snow is found in that scene between Glencoe and Glencreran one February, in Scotland, where Ronald Cameron comes forth to bring to his father’92s house his cousin, Flora Macdonald, for the celebration of a birthday, and the calm day turns into a hurricane of white fury that leaves Ronald and Flora as dead, to be resuscitated by the shepherds. What an exciting struggle had Bayard Taylor among the wintry Appenines.
In the winter of 1812, by a similar force, the destiny of Europe was decided. The French army marched up toward Moscow, five hundred thousand men. What can resist them? Not bayonets, but the dumb elements overwhelm that host. Napoleon retreats from Moscow with about two hundred thousand men, a mighty nucleus for another campaign after he gets back to Paris. The morning of October 19th, when they start for home, is bright and beautiful. The air is tonic, and, although this Russian campaign has been a failure, Napoleon will try again in some other direction with his host of brave surviving Frenchmen. But a cloud comes on the sky, and the air gets chill, and one of the soldiers feels on his cheek a snowflake, and then there is a multiplication of these wintry messages, and soon the plumes of the officers are decked with another style of plume, and then all the skies let loose upon the warriors a hurricane of snow, and the march becomes difficult, and the horses find it hard to pull the supply train, and the men begin to fall under the fatigue, and many, not able to take another step, lie down in the drifts never to rise, and the cavalry horses stumble and fall, and one thousand of the army fall, and ten thousand perish, and twenty thousand go down, and fifty thousand, and a hundred thousand, and a hundred and twenty thousand, and a hundred and thirty-two thousand die, and the victor of Jena and bridge of Lodi and Eylau and Austerlitz, where three great armies commanded by three emperors surrendered to him, now himself surrenders to the snowflakes. Historians do not seem to recognize that the tide in that man’92s life turned from December the 16th, 1809, when he banished by hideous divorce his wife Josephine from the palace and so challenged the Almighty, and the Lord charged upon him from the fortresses of the sky with ammunition of crystal. Snowed under! Billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions of flakes did the work. And what a suggestion of accumulative power, and what a rebuke to all of us who get discouraged because we cannot do much, and therefore do nothing.
’93Oh,’94 says some one, ’93I would like to stop the forces of sin and crime that are marching for the conquest of the nations; but I am nobody, I have neither wealth nor eloquence nor social power. What can I do?’94 My brother, how much do you weigh? as much as a snowflake? ’93Oh, yes.’94 Then do your share. It is an aggregation of small influences that will yet put this lost world back into the bosom of a pardoning God. Alas, that there are so many men and women who will not use the one talent because they have not ten, and will not give a penny because they cannot give a dollar, and will not speak as well as they can because they are not eloquent, and will not be a snowflake because they cannot be an avalanche. In earthly wars the generals get about all the credit, but in the war for God and righteousness and heaven all the private soldiers will get crowns of victory unfailing. When we reach heaven’97by the grace of God may we all arrive there!’97I do not think we will be able to begin the new song right away, because of the surprise we shall feel at the comparative rewards given. As we are being conducted along the street to our celestial residence, we will begin to ask where live some of those who were mighty on earth. We will ask, ’93Is so-and-so here?’94 And the answer will be, ’93Yes, I think he is in the city, but we do not hear much of him; he was good and he got in, but he took most of his pay in earthly applause; he had enough grace to get through the gate, but just where he lives I know not. He squeezed through somehow, although I think the gates took the skirts of his garments. I think he lives in one of those back streets in one of the plainer residences.’94
Then we shall see a palace, the doorsteps of gold, and the windows of agate, and the tower like the sun for brilliance, and chariots before the door, and people who look like princes and princesses going up and down the steps, and we shall say, ’93Which of the hierarchs lives here? That must be the residence of a Paul or a Milton, or some one whose name resounds through all the planet from which we have just ascended.’94 ’93No, no,’94 says our celestial dragoman, ’93that is the residence of a soul whom you never heard of. When she gave a charity, her left hand knew not what her right hand did. She was mighty in secret prayer, and no one but God and her own soul knew it. She had more trouble than anybody in all the land where she lived, and without complaining she bore it, and though her talents were never great, what she had was all consecrated to God and helping others, and the Lord is making up for her earthly privation by especial raptures here, and the King of this country had that palace built especially for her. The walls began to go up when her troubles and privations and consecration began on earth, and it so happened’97what a heavenly coincidence!’97that the last stroke of the trowel of amethyst on those walls was given the hour she entered heaven. You know nothing of her. On earth her name was only once in the newspapers, and that among the column of the dead, but she is mighty up here. There she comes now, out of her palace grounds, in her chariot behind those two white horses, for a ride on the banks of the river that flows from under the throne of God. Let me see. Did you not have in your world below an old classic which says something about ’91these are they who came out of great tribulation, and they shall reign forever and ever?’92’93
As we pass up the street I find a good many on foot, and I say to the dragoman, ’93Who are these?’94 And when their name is announced I recognize that some of them were on earth great poets and great orators and great merchants and great warriors, and when I express my surprise about their going afoot, the dragoman says, ’93In this country people are rewarded not according to the number of their earthly talents, but according to the use they made of what they had.’94 And then I thought to myself: ’93Why, that theory would make a snowflake that falls cheerfully and in the right place, and does all the work assigned it, as honorable as a whole Mont Blanc of snowflakes.’94 ’93Yes, yes,’94 says the celestial dragoman, ’93Many of these pearls that you find on the foreheads of the righteous, and many of the gems in the jewel-case of prince and princess, are only the petrified snowflakes of earthly tempest, for God does not forget the promise made in regard to them: ’91They shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.’92’93 Accumulated power! All the prayers and charities and kindnesses and talents of all the good concentred and compacted will be the world’92s evangelization. This thought of the aggregation of the many smalls into that one mighty is another treasure of the snow.
Another treasure of the snow is the suggestion of the usefulness of sorrow. Absence of snow makes all nations sick. One snowless winter does not end its disasters, for many months. It puts tens of thousands into the grave and leaves others in homes and hospitals, gradually to go down. Called by a trivial name, the Russian ’93grip,’94 it became an international plague. Plenty of snow means public health. There is no medicine that so soon cures the world’92s malarias as these white pellets that the clouds administer. Pellets small enough to be homoeopathic, but in such large doses as to be allopathic, and melting soon enough to be hydropathic. Like a sponge, every flake absorbs unhealthy gases. The tables of mortality immediately lessen when the snows of December begin to fall. The snow is one of the grandest and best of the world’92s doctors.
Yes; it is necessary for the land’92s productiveness. Great snows in winter are generally followed by great harvests the next summer. Scientific analysis has shown that snow contains a larger percentage of ammonia than the rain, and hence its greater power of enrichment. And besides that, it is a white blanket to keep the earth warm. An examination of snow in Siberia showed that it was a hundred degrees warmer under the snow than above the snow. Alpine plants perished in the mild winter of England for lack of enough snow to keep them warm. Snow strikes back the rich gases, which otherwise would escape in the air and be lost. Thank God for the snows, high and deep and wide and enriching; they bring the harvests which embroider with gold this entire American continent. But who with any analogical faculty can notice that out of such chill as the snow comes the wheat, without realizing that chilling sorrows produce harvests of grace! The strongest Christians, without exception, are those who, by bereavements or sickness or poverty or persecution, or all of them together, were snowed under, and again and again snowed under. These snowstorms of trouble! They kill the malarias of the soul. They drive us out of worldly dependence to God. Call the roll of all the eminently pious of all the ages and you will find them the sons and daughters of sorrow. The Maronites say that one characteristic of the cedar tree is that when the air is full of snow, and it begins to descend, the tree lifts its branches in a way better to receive the snow and bear up under it, and I know by much observation that the grandest cedars of Christian character lift higher their branches toward God, when the snows of trouble are coming. Lord Nelson’92s coffin was made out of the masts of the ship L’92Orient, in which he had fought so bravely, and your throne in heaven, oh, suffering child of God, will be built out of conquered earthly disasters. What gave John Bunyan such a wondrous dream of the celestial city? The Bedford penitentiary. What gave Richard Baxter such power to tell of the Saints’92 Everlasting Rest, and give his immortal Call to the Unconverted? Physical disease which racked every nerve of his body. What made George Whitefield so mighty in saving souls, bringing ten thousand to God when others brought a hundred? Persecution that caricatured and assailed him all up and down England, and dead vermin thrown in his face when he was preaching. What mellowed and glorified Wilberforce’92s Christian character? A financial misfortune that led him to write: ’93I know not why my life is spared so long, except it be to show that a man can be as happy without a fortune as with one.’94 What gave John Milton such deep spiritual eyesight that he could see the battle of angels? Extinguishment of physical eyesight. What is the highest observatory for studying the stars of hope and faith and spiritual promise? The believer’92s sick-bed. What proclaims the richest and most golden harvests that wave on all the hills of heavenly rapture? The snows, the deep snows, the awful snows of earthly calamity. And that thought is one of the treasures of the snow.
Another treasure of the snow is the suggestion that this mantle covering the earth is like the soul after it is forgiven. ’93Wash me,’94 said the Psalmist, ’93and I shall be whiter than snow.’94 My dear friend, Gasherie De Witt, went over to Geneva, Switzerland, for the recovery of his health, but the Lord had something better for him than earthly recovery. Little did I think when I bade him good-by one lovely afternoon on the other side the sea, to return to America, that we would not meet again till we meet in heaven. As he lay one Sabbath morning on his dying pillow in Switzerland, the window open, he was looking out upon Mont Blanc. The air was clear. That great mountain stood in its robe of snow, glittering in the morning light, and my friend said to his wife: ’93Jennie, do you know what that snow on Mont Blanc makes me think of? It makes me think that the righteousness of Christ and the pardon of God cover all the sins and imperfections of my life, as that snow covers up that mountain; for the promise is that though our sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’94 Was not that glorious? I do not care who you are, or where you are, you need as much as I do that cleansing which made Gasherie De Witt good while he lived and glorious when he died. Do not take it as the tenet of an obsolete theology that our nature is corrupt. We must be changed. We must be made over again.
The ancients thought that snow-water had especial power to wash out deep stains. All other water might fail, but melted snow would make them clean. Well, Job had great admiration for snow, but he declares in substance that if he should wash his soul in melted snow, he would still be covered with mud like a man down in a ditch. Job_9:30 : ’93If I wash myself with snow-water, and make my hands never so clean, yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me.’94 We must be washed in the fountain of God’92s mercy, before we can be whiter than snow. ’93Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord.’94 Oh, for the cleansing power!
If there be among us one man or woman whose thoughts have always been right, whose words always right, and whose actions always right, let such a one declare it. Not one! All we, like sheep, have gone astray. Unclean! unclean! And yet we may be made whiter than snow, whiter than that which, on a cold winter’92s morning, after a night of storm, clothes the tree from bottom of trunk to top of highest branch; whiter than that which makes the Adirondacks and the Sierra Nevada and Mount Washington heights of pomp and splendor fit to enthrone an archangel.
In the time of Grahame, the essayist, in one mountain district of Scotland, an average of ten shepherds perished every winter in the snow-drifts, and so he proposed that, at the distance of every mile, a pole fifteen feet high and with two cross-pieces be erected, showing the points of the compass, and that a bell be hung at the top, so that every breeze would ring it, and the lost one on the mountains would hear the sound and take the direction given by this pole with the cross-pieces and get safely home. Whether that proposed plan was adopted or not, I do not know; but I declare to all who are in the heavy and blinding drifts of sin and sorrow that there is a cross near-by that can direct you to home and peace and God. Hear you not the ringing of the Gospel bell hanging on that cross, saying: ’93This is the way, walk ye in it?’94 No wonder that the sacred poet put the Psalmist’92s thought into rhythm, with that ringing chorus we have so often sung:
Dear Jesus, I long to be perfectly whole;
I want thee forever to live in my soul.
Break down very idol, cast down every foe!
Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow!
Whiter than snow! yes, whiter than snow!
Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow!
Get that prayer answered, and we will be fit not only for earth, but for the heaven where everything is so white because everything is so pure. You know that the redeemed in that land wear robes that are white, and the conquerors in that land ride horses that are white, and John in vision says of Christ, ’93his head and his hairs were white,’94 and the throne on which he sits is a Great White Throne. By the pardoning and sanctifying grace of God, may we all at last stand amid that radiance!
Ten thousand times ten thousand,
In glittering armor bright,
The armies of the living God,
Throng up the steeps of light.
’91Tis finished, all is finished,
Their fight with death and sin:
Throw open wide the golden gates,
And let the conquerors in.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage