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The Spike: or, Victoria College Review, September 1926

The Everest of the Spirit — macmillan brown prize essay for 1925

page 27

The Everest of the Spirit

macmillan brown prize essay for 1925.

We have long been wondering what the examiners demanded who set forth the subjects for the MacMillan Brown Prize, and one morning in the midst of our meditations on the subject, the postman arrives with an elongated vermilion pamphlet.

Ha! a Communist tract, we think, but we are wrong as usual. The title reads, "The Everest of the Spirit," and on further perusal, we find that the author is the Reverend Clyde Carr, the winner of the coveted prize.

We were informed that the subject was "The Call of the mountains," so let us give it all our attention. Let us try to capture the terror of the amateur mountaineer on scaling a precipice where every foothold proves to be of rotton rock; the bliss of sixty miles an hour glissades, headfirst, feet first, sideways, all together; the appalling sensation when on walking over a snow covered pass we stray from the track and plunge up to our necks in some hidden icy tarn; the comradeship of such holidays in the mountains immeasurably far from the dust and swirl of the city; the colour and brilliance of the stars in those altitudes; the blue of the ice caves and avalanche boulders; the silence of a windless snowfield. Let us look within the pamphlet and quench our thirst!

We skim the history of the Everest Expedition in the first page or so, and then are rudely plumped into the midst of the fortunate congregation who sit beneath Mr. Can's eye, Sunday after Sunday, in some sunless church. We listen to an impassioned harangue upon "The intimate connection between mountaineering and the struggle upward of the inner self, between 'Everest' and the 'Spirit'."

Mountaineering is only valuable in that it opens to us "avenues of approach to the heavenly places," and we need not even go mountaineering for "it may be the human countenance that proves to be the open sesame to the unseen,——or the word or deed of truth."

The mountains have, of course, a certain value, "every respectable eminence woos the aspiring soul." So on we go, leaping from quotation to quotation, over the dangerous crevasses of "impotence and futility," where Mr. Carr leads us, till at last we reach the grand finale, the topmost peak—fifteen lines from Rabbi Ben Ezra— and with sighs of relief, the congregation stands and begins fumbling for its threepennybits.