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Show 236. concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. Such was simply not the case. He was abjuring the world when he went out, and those who cared about him were constantly trying to bring him back in. His condemnation of the "house habit," the "strange dread of pure night air," which he discovered in the Emerson Party in 1870, was the result of his many nights spent out in the mountains. He had learned to live in Nature and to see the glory. Commentators have noticed Muir's abundant use of the word glorious, a habit which later was an object of criticism by his editor, Robert Underwood Johnson. Yet glorious was exactly the term which Muir meant, glory being an Old Testament term signifying God's presence. Muir used the term in very much the same way that Jonathan Edwards, in his Personal Narrative, used it when describing the increasing sense of the divine, the appearance of divine glory in every thing. Indeed, Edwards used the example of a thunderstorm which became a source of delight, where before his senses were altered nothing had been so terrible. Before he had been terrified, but now he was rejoiced, as he "felt God's presence, so to speak at the first appearance of a thunder storm." Further, like Muir, Edwards would Fix myself in order to view the clouds and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and aweful voice of God's thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of |