“Fear not, thou worm Jacob, thou shalt thresh the mountains.” — Isaiah 41:14.
In the west of America, at the foot of the Rockies, on the Pacific coast, there are very strange and very interesting gullies. Geologists go from all parts of the world to see them. You can sail for miles inland in narrow, canal-like creeks, great fissures in the Rockies into which waves of the Pacific wind for miles, right into the heart of the country. As the steamer goes into the narrow creek, behold, there seems right before you a precipice of beetling rock. Yet full speed is registered. There is no reversing of the engines; you seem as if steered to go to pieces on that frowning rocky crag. The captain is on the bridge, unconcerned; and the screws are churning the water beneath the vessel and “straight ahead” you are going, when, lo, just as the prow seems to touch the rock, and you wonder that they are not reversing the engines, the crag splits, and you see right at its base a waterway that would almost float the navies of the world, nestling in the heart of the mountain. You never saw it till you went straight up. A timorous man would have turned, would have signaled with the bell to reverse the engines, to go full speed astern. It was faith, the faith of knowledge, the faith of having been there before, that made the steamer go right ahead, into the cleft where it could go sailing through. Go straight on; God will provide for the difficulty. Oh, I can say this Sabbath morning from my heart: “Go straight on; never slacken speed. Go right ahead.” Never the brain of a Christian was scattered on a rock that he went straight ahead against. Never; God will rather whirl the earth from his path than have you come to harm. Go right ahead, thou worm Jacob; thou shalt thresh the mountain.
By J. Wilbur Chapan, “Present Day Parables.”