I do love the mountains and I've loved them ever since I can remember anything at all.

That quote comes to us from J. Gressum Machen.

Machen was born in 1881 and he died on January 1st, 1937.

And Macon left behind for us a great legacy.

He left behind the legacy of a denomination

in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

He left behind a legacy in a seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary,

and also in a number of great books, of course Christianity and liberalism, a classic text,

perhaps even more necessary and more urgent given the challenges

that the Church of today is facing than when Machen first wrote that book in

1923. And he wrote many other books. He wrote one book in particular

they gave me many sleepless nights in seminary and that's his New Testament

Greek for beginners. And in addition to the seminary and denomination and books, Machen also had a lot of other shorter writings, and one of them is a piece that was published in Christianity today entitled Mountains

Mountains and why we love them.

Machen did, as he says in this piece, love the mountains.

He lived in Baltimore, but his family would vacation up in Bar Harbor, Maine.

And so his first exposure to the mountains were the great mountains of New England.

And then when he graduated from Johns Hopkins University, his parents gave him as a graduation present a trip to Switzerland, and there he went to Switzerland and he had his first encounter with the Alps.

Throughout his life and as time permitted and his duties allowed, he would find himself back in

Switzerland and back on these Alps and he's speaking in this piece Mountains

and why we love them of what he had to learn. He remembers in particular one time when he was

standing there on the matter horn and he could look out over essentially all of

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