A child might say to a geographer: “You talk about the earth being round! Look on this great crag; look on that deep dell; look on yonder great mountain, and the valley at its feet, and yet you talk about the earth being round.” The geographer’s view is comprehensive; he does not look at the surface of the world in mere detail; he does not deal with inches and feet and yards; he sees a larger world than the child has had time to grasp. And so it is with God’s wonderful dealings with us: there are great rocks and barren deserts, deep, dank, dark pits and defiles, and glens and dells, rugged places that we cannot smooth over at all, and yet when He comes to say to us at the end of the journey, “Now, look back; there is the way that I have brought you,” we shall be enabled to say, “Thou hast gone before us, and made our way straight.”
