the cedars are now imperiled by ravenous goats

The expression “the cedars are now imperiled by ravenous goats” appears in a published sermon that Dieter Breitsprecher encounters while recovering from a train accident. Its warning about endangered trees becomes a compact, uneasy image of conservation: people can contribute money to protect a distant forest while continuing to use forests around them as resources. The passage also connects Dieter’s growing interest in forest preservation to an older, personal sense of trees as more than timber.

The Sermon and Its Warning

During his convalescence, Dieter writes to men concerned about the disappearance of North American forests. He is unsure whether their concern is connected to a broader sense of national identity, but he recognizes a shift in how people regard trees: the forest is no longer only an oppressive enemy, and particular trees—especially massive trees or landmarks—are receiving attention and honor.

Among the materials that move him is Trees of Life, a slender volume of sermons by a Unitarian minister in western Massachusetts. The sermon on the cedars of Lebanon describes them as great, dark trees of God that sheltered angels, and recalls that King Solomon’s hundred thousand axmen felled them. Its final appeal warns that the cedars are threatened by goats eating their young shoots. The expression makes the danger specific: the trees’ future depends on vulnerable new growth, not simply on admiration for their ancient grandeur.

Protection and Contradiction

The sermon reports that Queen Victoria sent money to build a wall protecting the cedars from destruction. The congregation, too, contributes generously to their preservation. Yet its members continue to quarter their own herds on public forestlands. The contrast unsettles the moral confidence of the appeal: a community can act generously on behalf of distant trees while leaving its own use of shared forests unchallenged.

The goats’ threat is therefore more than a picturesque warning. It exposes the gap between reverence expressed in sermons and money and the everyday practices that place forests at risk. The passage does not suggest that the congregation’s contribution is meaningless; rather, its force lies in showing that protection in one place can coexist with exploitation elsewhere.

Dieter’s Memory of Trees

Dieter avoids abstract theological debate, but he is interested in the American movement from hostility toward forests to something approaching veneration, a feeling he had known since childhood in Germany. After his parents died, his grandmother took him to see the Heede Riesenlinde, an ancient tree she called a “justice tree and much more.” Beneath it, she told him a version of the story of Siegfried and the dragon, in which a lime leaf lodged on Siegfried’s back and marked the one place his armor could not protect.

That memory gives the sermon’s endangered cedars a personal counterpart. Trees in Dieter’s recollection are not interchangeable timber: they are landmarks, bearers of stories, and witnesses to human life. The expression thus joins his childhood inheritance to his present attention to disappearing forests, while the congregation’s contradiction warns how readily esteem for trees can remain separate from the conduct that would protect them.