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Show 200 as making "the surface of the moon look l i k e a golf course." Yet Mount Saint Helens i s part of the e a r t h . Her eruption ought to remind us that the e a r t h i s a l i v e . "What the earth does i s r i g h t , " Muir would say. Divine madness? Certainly his father thought so. So Muir found i t necessary to argue in terms which Christian people might understand. His text was Nature, but he could use a B i b l i c a l text if i t would strengthen his argument. Just as his father used I Corinthians as an authority for condemning h i s son's a c t i v i t i e s in the wilderness, so i t was a l s o the t e x t to which many of the Biblical allusions in Muir's journal can be traced. It is characteristic that he would turn the gospel marshaled against Nature towards an affirmation of her own supremacy. When sent a n a r r a t i v e of his son's adventure on the volcanic summit of Mount Shasta, Muir's father wrote b i t t e r l y: "I wished I had not seen i t , because i t harried up my feelings so with another of your hair-breadth escapes." Daniel Muir always had misgivings about his son and importuned early and late that one should do God's work, be l i k e Paul, and desire to know nothing "save Jesus Christ, and him crucified." Indeed Paul argues in I Corinthians that Man must redeem himself through the S p i r i t of God, the mind of God, to be known through the mind of C h r i s t . In these l a t t e r days one must accept the New Testament, said Muir's father, taking Paul's argument as his model, and asking his son to abjure the world: I t is no use to look through a glass darkly when we have the Gospel and i t s fulfillment, and when the true |
