No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

John Muir (1838–1914), the Scottish-born American naturalist and leading advocate for wilderness preservation, often framed wild nature as a direct avenue to spiritual experience. This remark reflects his late-19th-century critique of industrial logging and the conversion of forests into lumber for human institutions. Muir repeatedly contrasted the immediacy of “God’s” presence in mountains, forests, and wild places with what he saw as the spiritual and ecological impoverishment caused by cutting them down. The sentiment aligns with his broader campaign to protect places like Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada and with his tendency to use religious language to argue that wilderness has intrinsic value beyond economic use.

The quote argues that nature is humanity’s earliest and most authentic sacred space: hills and groves function as “temples” because they inspire awe, humility, and a sense of the divine without mediation. Muir then turns the metaphor into an indictment: when forests are felled and reshaped into churches and cathedrals, the very materials of worship are taken from the living world that most vividly discloses the sacred. The more people replace wild sanctuaries with built ones, the “farther off” God seems—suggesting that spiritual distance follows ecological destruction. It is both a theological claim (divinity is encountered in creation) and an environmental ethic (preservation is a form of reverence).