Excerpt from A Thanksgiving Sermon: Delivered at St. John's Church, Georgetown

The mountains shall bring peace to the people. - psalm lxxii: 3.

IT was one of the loveliest evenings in the month of J une when, on a day and hour not easily forgotten, I began the ascent of Mount Vesuvius. The mountain was in a state of extreme agitation, and the flames that issued from its summit gave it the effect of a vast torch suspended in mid-air over the bay and City of N aples. During the earlier part of the ascent, what chiefly struck the eye was the marvellous luxu rianee with which foliage, fruits and flowers were blended, or, rather, heaped together upon the mountain side. At every step the vine, the fig tree and the olive entwined their branches above, in one triumphal arch, converting the road into an endless bower. This was due to the lava beds that lay below, and still more to the quickening heat of the fires that raged and roared within. These were the forces and these the agencies that produced that teeming and luxuriant landscape. How much that man calls destructive, both in the natural and moral world, is really, in the highest sense, creative. In the order of the divine Providence, beauty springs from ashes, and the oil of joy from movrn ing.

Just above this region of marvellous fertility the gentle slope changed suddenly to a steep and abrupt ascent. Ashes lay piled upon the path like snow-drifts, causing the traveller to sink knee deep at almost every step. A gloomy and aridplain succeeded, lighted only by the lurid glare of the stream of lava that rolled through it, and rugged and deformed with dark and jagged rocks that lay heaped on every side in wild irregularity. Across this plain suffocating vapors blew from time to time, which made it difficult to breathe. It was a scene dismal and desolate beyond description. The dreary and monotonous roar of the destroying lava; the poisonous gases with which the very air was impregnated the terrific explosions, deafening as the discharge of a hundred batteries the fiery, deadly showers of white-hot scoriae; the sights and sounds that threw an indescribable gloom over the whole region, while night hung darkly over it, banished all thought of enjoyment, and filled the mind with dismal and melan choly images. But when the day broke in beauty over the mountain summit and the scene below, when the morning mists began to float off from the vast and unrivalled land scape, revealing, by slow degrees, the city with its varied magnificence, the bay, with its flashing waters and blooming islands, the white-walled hamlets sprinkled along the coast amidst a sea of verdure-then the magic of that wondrous panorama wrought an equally wondrous revulsion in the mind of the spectator, causing him to perceive that the tri umphs and the splendors of that lofty vantage ground were cheaply won by the toils and terrors, the difficulties and perils, that attended the ascent.

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