“Faith is certainly a very lovely thing,” said the King with a pleased smile. “I can do anything, yes anything where there is this perfect faith or responsiveness to my will. It is their beautiful responsiveness which wakens the music in the trees of frankincense. There is nothing in the whole wide world which gives me more joy and appears fairer in my sight than the response of human hearts to my love. It is the will to obey me which makes the union complete between us and which enables me to pour my life and power into those who love me and respond to me continually.”

He ceased speaking and they sat in absolute silence looking out on the view spread before them. They were seated on the very edge of the Mountain of Frankincense, and in the intensely clear air they could see to a great distance.

Far below them was the Valley of Humiliation which had been the home of Grace and Glory when she had been Much-Afraid, and where all her relatives lived. But from this particular mountain they got quite a different view of it, for they were looking up the whole length of the valley instead of across it to the mountains on the other side. Grace and Glory could see that at both ends the long, green valley opened out into other valleys, and they too into yet more valleys, winding away among the mountains. All these many, many other valleys stretching further than her eyes could follow them, were also bounded by other mountain ranges towering upwards to snow-covered peaks, so that there were High Places above all the valleys.

Thus it was as though she was looking out over two worlds; a world of Low Places, and above them another world of High Places. But she well knew by this time that in one sense there were three worlds, for she knew that all the visible mountain ranges had still higher summits beyond them, which soared up into the heavens right out of sight, so that they were out of this world altogether. Those were the really High Places to which the King’s servants went when they had finished their service for him on earth.

For quite a long time she sat silently by the King’s side, her thoughts greatly occupied with the things that he had just been saying to her. She looked long and earnestly and a little fearfully at those far-off valleys stretching away in every direction beyond her own little “Home Valley.” How many of them there were! What multitudes and multitudes of people must live in those Low Places stretching over the face of the whole earth. People who knew absolutely nothing about the High Places because they knew nothing about the King of Love. People who never could know and experience the joy and rapture of union with him, unless someone went to tell them about him.