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it is how packed with emotions--how thoroughly attuned it already is to the heart of man-a very voice of God which, if it could utter all its notes at once, would give forth an infinite and eternal har

mony.

There is lodged in all created things--so far as we know-a capacity for sound. There is no substance so coarse and unyielding, except perhaps some clays, but has its note which may be brought out under conditions either of concussion or tension. Strike any solid thing, and in addition to the noise caused by the vibrating air you will hear a certain note or key that belongs to the thing itself; or stretch any tensible thing and it will give out a note peculiar to itself when it is sufficiently touched. We do not hear gases when they are gently moved, nor a bubble when it bursts, but only because our ears are dull to their fineness. The pipes in the organ have had no capacity given them, but simply yield up what their original substances contained. Once they were solid woods, gross tin or lead hidden in the heart of the earth, but even there they had this capacity for sound, and their note and quality, as they had color and chemical affinity. Man has only developed what was within them By arranging their shape and size and passing a current of air through them, we obtain a sound which the ear pronounces a musical note. And so we speak of a brassy sound-referring it not to a law of vibration nor to the shape of the instrument, but to its substance. Not only a certain kind of wood is required by the violinist, but only a cer tain quality of that wood will give him the quality of sound he desires. Some substances give forth their notes without re-arrangement by simple concussion, or friction, or tension. Water falling from various heights, and reeds of different lengths swept by the wind, and branches of trees bending under the storm, utter their notes, sometimes forming almost harmony. And so we may consider the earth as a harp strung with innumerable strings, silent yet, but full of tuneful sounds and needing only the skill of man to bring them out. This universal capacity for sound or tone is not a bare and unrelated thing, but is connected with a law of music which has its seat first in the air and then in the mind of man. We find in the air the musical scale or octave consisting of eight notes formed by quicker or slower vibrations, and so having a mathematical basis. All we can say of this law is that it is a law—why and how we cannot tell. Corresponding to this law of the air is a law of hearing within us, so that the musical sense with which we are endowed accords with the musical law of vibration. Thus the scale or octave has two apparent sources or foundations-one in the air, the other in man. The octave does not more truly exist in the mathematical vibration of air than in the mind. We speak vaguely if we say that man has a capacity for hearing the octave in the air; the law of the oc tave, with its mathematical exactness, is wrought into his nature as thoroughly as it is wrought into the external world. The wonderful thing here is not the adaptation of nature to man, but the absolute identity of the law in nature and the law in man; for if we only silently think the octave, we think it as under the same mathematical law as when we hear it in actual vibration. We behold here a manifestation of God that goes far beyond that of a skillful designer-forcing on us the thought that God is in the laws themselves. And so, at once, we leap to the grand conclusion that it is because God is so immersed, as it were, in these laws that we can use them for His praise beyond any others revealed to us. The subject is full of suggestion at this point.

Most impressive is the teleological aspect of it. Begin as far back in creation as you will-in the geologic ages when there was no ear to hear-and you find this capacity for sound in all material things; no harmony, no music as yet, but only a note ready to be brought out, and in the forming air a law of vibration ready to turn the note into harmony, and finally the ear of man ready to catch the harmonies that his skill evokes, and behind the ear the soul ready to praise God in the sounds and harmonies so prepared from the beginning. Here is an orderly sequence of steps and adaptations mounting continually higher-proceeding from God in creation and at last ending in God in the accorded praise of His own conscious image,

We do not find in nature what may properly be called music, but only its materials and its laws. Man only can create music, for nothing is perfect in creation until, in some way, it touches or passes through man. He is the end and object of creation, and its processes are full and have meaning only when they issue in him. Everything in nature is a puzzle until it finds its solution in man, who solves it by connecting it in some way with God, and so completes the circle of creation Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. But sound even before it becomes music may be the occasion of emotion, though not of complex emotions, or-we may say-intelligent emotion. It is the peculiarity of the sounds of nature that they awaken but a single emotion; each thing has its note and some one corresponding feeling. Enter at evening a grove of pines and listen to the wind sighing through the branches; the term by which we spontaneously describe it indicates the one feeling of pensive melancholy it awakens, but an orchestra could not render it more effectively. It lacks, however, the quality of intelligence because it is not combined with other sounds for some end. The song "What are the wild waves saying?" raises a question hard to answer. It is not a hymn to the great Creator until it has passed through the adoring and reflecting mind of man. But even if there is no music in nature-not even in the notes of birds, as the men of science tell us, for the birds but whistle-there are the materials of music, all furnished with their notes set to corresponding emotions; and the gamut is broader than has been compassed. Beyond the reach of the ear of man is a universe of sound-vibrations slower and deeper than those of Niagara, quicker and finer than those of the mosquito's wing, and each is dowered with power to awaken some emotion that now we do not feel because we do not hear the sound. The materialists are much concerned about the possibility of an environment in case of a future life. Where and of what? they ask. Well, here is an environment of possible emotion transcending present knowledge, and so perhaps awaiting minds to feel it. It is difficult to believe that God has put Himself into creation in the form of emotional sounds and no ear be made to hear them. If a part of creation comes to a realized use in man, why not the whole? If creation is the path between God and man by which they come to each other, must not man journey along the whole of it, even as God has?

But if there is no music in nature there is a prophecy and some hint, and even faint articulation of it. In a favoring spot an echo often starts another echo, but an octave above, and in rare places still answer

ing echoes not only in the same key but always in harmony, softer and sweeter. This is almost music, and seems a call to man to liberate it from the prison of matter and suffer it to become the harmony it is striving to express reminding one of that striking passage of Goethe's child correspondent: "When I stand all alone at night in open nature, I feel as though it were a spirit and begged redemption of me. Often have I had the sensation, as if nature, in wailing sadness, entreated something of me, so that not to understand what she longed cut through my very heart." The child uttered the deepest philosophy and touched the very secret of creation-even this, that God is not above creation as a mechanician, but is in it by indwelling presence, one with its laws, Himself the secret energy of its processes and the soul of the sentiments and thoughts lodged within it, and so coming to man for recognition. There is no fuller revelation of God in nature than is found in these laws of sound by which He comes into the very heart of man, even to its inmost recesses of love and adoration; and it requires only a sensitive, child-like heart to interpret this speechless music locked within nature as the voice of God pleading to be let out into music and praise through the heart of man, for so only can His works praise Him.

I turn abruptly from this world of sound as a revelation of God, to music as a revelation or prophecy of the future. I do not say the future world nor the future of humanity in this world, as I mean both and regard them as one. There is a future of this world in a historical sense, and there is a future world that is above history; but if death is all that divides them, and if death is abolished, they become one. Hence, while the distinction in some ways is to be retained, in moral ways the two worlds are to be regarded as one. Regenerated humanity and heaven are interchangeable terms; they are alike, and one simply passes on and up into the other. It is a central conception of Christianity that death is but an incident in the external history of man. Hence Christ sweeps it out of His path almost as with the scorn of indifference. Hence also in the Apocalypse, with this principle to guide us, we read of heaven and find it refers to this world; the new Jerusalem comes down from God out of heaven, and the tabernacle of God is with men. Is it here or there? We need not answer except to say that it is both, but under a conception of eternity and not of time. This inseparable blending of moral perfection and heavenly existence, so confusing to ordinary thought, is itself a revelation not to be passed by, and one under which we should teach ourselves to think and act. In its struggle with thought and language to unfold the way to future perfection, the universe itself is taxed for forms of expression. The sun and moon, the stars, the sea, thunders and lightnings, the four winds, the rocks, mountains and islands, fire and earthquake, hail and smoke, trees and green grass, horses and lions and locusts and scorpions, the clouds and the rainbow, dragons and floods, eagles and nameless beasts, the serpent and the lamb, the forces of nature in their mightiest exhibition, the travail of birth, the cities and the nations, all angels and men, temples and altars, kings and queens and wine of wrath, bottomless pits and fiery lakes, death and mourning and famine, merchants with their merchandise of gold and the souls of men-such are the materials of which the drama of human society is composed as it moves on towards perfection. But as the end draws nigh, this tumultuous scenery of the elements and of lower nature passes away, and another order of imagery appears. Now we behold a city lying four-square,

open on all sides, paved with gold, watered by a river of life and fed by a tree of life and lighted by the glory of God. But underneath the whole mighty process of advancing righteousness and continuous jndgment is heard the note of praise-harpers harping with their harps-and, at the end, the song of Moses and of the Lamb-the song of deliverance and victory. The underlying or central image of the Apocalypse is song-the voice of harpers mingling with the voice of great thunders and of many waters and of a great multitude--heard throughout and heard at last in the universal ascription—“ Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth."

If we take this central image and ask why it is used to describe heaven or the future of regenerated humanity, the answer would be--because of its fitness. If this final condition were defined in bare words, it would be as follows: Obedience, Sympathy, Feel. ing or Emotion, and Adoration. These, in a sense, constitute Heaven, or the state of regenerated humanity. By the consent of all ages, heaven has been represented under a conception of music, and will be in all ages to come. It is subjected to many sneers, but the sneer is very shallow. The human mind must have some form under which it can think of its destiny. It is not content to leave it in vagueness. It is a real world we are in, and we are real men and women in it. We dwell in mystery and within limitations, but over and above the mystery and the limitation is an indestructible sense of reality. I am, and I know that I am. Standing on this solid rock, I find reality about me, nor can I be persuaded that other beings and things are dreams or shadows. It is in my very nature to believe in reality, and so I demand defihite conceptions, nor can I rest in vagueness or be content with formless visions and their abstractions. Thus the human mind has always worked and thus it always will work-leaving behind it the logicians and plodders in science, in the free exercise of the logic of human nature. I do not absolutely know what sort of a world this will be when it is regenerated, but I must have some conception of it. I do not absolutely know what heaven is like—it will be like only to itself—but if I think of it at all, I must do so under some present definite conception. The highest forms under which we can now think are art-forms-the proportion of statuary and architecture, the color of painting, and music. The former are limited and address a mere sense of beauty, but music addresses the heart and has its vocation amongst the feelings and covers their whole range. Hence music has been chosen to hold and express our conception of moral perfection. Nor is it an arbitrary choice, but is made for the reasons that music is the utterance of the heart, it is an expression of morality, and it is an infinite language. Before the sneer at heaven as a place of endless song can prevail, it must undo all this stout logic of the human heart. We so represent it because when we frame our conception of heaven or moral perfection, we find certain things, and when we look into the nature and operations of music, we find the same things, namely: Obedience, Sympathy, Emotion, Adoration.

Sculpture and painting have their laws which they must rigidly obey, but they address chiefly the sense of form and proportion and color, and end chiefly in a sense of mere beauty and fitness; they are largely intellectual, and yield their results chiefly in the intellect. But music goes farther. While its laws are as exact and fine as those of form and color and even more recondite, any breaking of them begets a deeper sense of disobedience. When we see a distorted

form or ill matched colors, the eye is offended, but there is no such protest as that of the ear when it is assailed by discord. False proportion and crudely joined colors provoke what may be called mental indignation, but nothing more; the borders of feeling are reached but not deeply penetrated.

But a dis

cord of sounds lays hold of the nerves and rasps them into positive pain. In fine natures it may even cause extreme physiological disturbance. A statue could not be so ugly nor a painting so ill-colored as to produce spasms, but such a result is quite possible through discord. The sensitiveness of musicians is not a matter of sentiment, and is the farthest from affectation, but is a matter of nerves.

The protest and the pain are exactly of the same nature as those caused by a fall and concussion. But, reaching the mind along the wounded nerves, it awakens there the same feelings of anger and resentment that we feel when we have been ruthlessly struck. A discord of sounds is unendurable, but we hardly say that of vio. lations of form and color. This shows that we are much more finely related to the laws of sound than to those of form and color, and that the relation covers a wider range of our nature; or, in other words, that music is a better type of obedience. When its laws are broken, the history of disobedience is written out in the protests of our whole beingfrom quivering nerve to the indignation of the heart. There is also an exactness in the laws of harmony thal makes obedience to them specially fine, and so fit to be a type of it. While, as in every art, it can only approximate an ideal-never reaching, perhaps, actual harmony,-it is more rigidly under law and comes nearer its ideal than any other. It is able more thoroughly to overcome the grossness of matter and to use it for its ends than is statuary or painting -nature is more pliant to it. There is a latitudinarianism in other arts that admits of defense, but there is none in music. The sculptor may trench on the laws of form for the sake of deepening expres. sion, but the musician seeks higher effects by an increasing adherence to the laws of his art. If he admits a discord it is not as a variation from harmony, but as a denial of it, and is used to shock the hearer into a deeper sense of the investing concord. Nor is any other art so fine in the distinctions it makes. Nothing can be more exact and more minute than the laws of light by which form is revealed, but the eye is not so keen to mark slight departures from the law of form as is the ear in noting variations in its realm. A highly-trained musician can detect a variation from the pitch of th of a semitone, but the best mechanical eye could not detect a correspondingly fine variation of a line from the perpendicular, nor could the nicest sense of color perceive a like variation of shade. There is also this peculiar and Suggestive difference between the eye and the ear and their action: the eye never transcends the laws of light and form; it always acts within the limits of mathematical laws, and is transcended by them, but the musical ear recognizes laws for which no scientific basis is yet found. In the tuning of any stringed instrument certain requirements of the ear are heeded for which no reasons can be given; the problem is too subtle even for such an one as Helmholtz-suggesting that music is that form of art in which man expresses his transcendence of nature. As man himselt reaches beyond nature and its laws, and goes over into another, even a spiritual world, so music is the art that lends itself to this feature of his nature, going along with it and opening the doors as it mounts Into the heavens.

This fine obedience in music is best seen, however,

in its execution. When voice joins with voice in the harmony of their contrasted parts, and instruments add their deeper and higher tones-trumpets and viols and reeds each giving their various sounds-voices as of a great multitude it may be, and instruments as of the full orchestra-and all, binding themselves down to exact law, conspire to the utterance of manifold harmony, we have not only the most perfect illustration of obedience but the joy of obedience; one is immediately transmuted into the other; we are. thus let into the soul of obedience and find it to be

joy-that its law is a law of life. The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in. it, and it is full only as the obedience is entire. Thus we see how this art becomes prophetic. There is a double yet single goal before humanity-the goal of obedience to the eternal laws and the goal of bliss. The race is long, and slowly are the mile-stones of ages passed, but when the foot of the runner has touched the last bound, his hands also touch either pillar of the goal; he has obeyed and he is blest. But in all the race he has a continual lesson and a constant presage in this divine art of music-its laws glorifying obedience and its joy feeding his tired spirit.

Music is, beyond all other arts, the expression and vehicle of sympathy. The highest action of man's. nature is the free play of sympathy-not agreement of thought nor concurrence of will, but feeling with another. This alone is true unity. If the human race achieves any destiny it will be of this sort; if there be a heaven it will be a heaven of sympathy. The promise and presage of it are not only wrought into our hearts but into the divine art we are considering. No other art, no other mode of impression, equals music in its power to awaken a common feeling. The orator approaches it, but he deals chiefly with convictions, and conviction is a slow and hard path to feeling, while music makes a direct appeal. A patriotic hymn does its work far more surely and quickly than does an argument for the Constitution; and the orator is not effective till he borrows from music something of its rhythm and cadence and purity of tone. Wendell Phillips, the most persuasive orator of the age, spoke in as strict accord with the laws of music as a trained singer, and often it was the melody of his voice that "won the cause." Music leaves logic behind in the race towards sympathy and action, and if it were not itself noble and true, if it did not hide and lose its power when yoked to a bad cause, it would work great mischief in society. It abets reason, and only discloses its full power and works its mightiest results when used in the service of truth. Hence there is no music in nations and races that are without nobility of thought, and there is no truer test of the quality of a nation than its music. Bach and Haydn and Beethoven would be impossible in a nation that did not produce a Kant, a Schelling, and a Schleiermacher; and the former are as truly exponents of its character as the latter.

The main office of music is to secure sympathy. When a great singer, taking words that are themselves as music, joins them to notes set with a master's skill, and, pouring into perfect tones the passion of a feeling heart, so describes some tragic tale of death, every heart of a thousand hearers beats with a common feeling, and every mind, for the time, runs in the same path of pity and sadness; for the moment there is absolute sympathy. If instead a truth or principle underlie the song, there is also a temporary agreement in thought. The moral and social value of such experiences is great; they lead

away from selfishness, and point to that harmony of thought aud feeling towards which humanity is struggling. So, too, in producing music, its highest effects can be gained only when the performers not only read and utter alike, but feel alike. Hence there is in music a moral law of sympathy as imperative as its mathematical laws. Hence also no one who is centrally selfish ever becomes great either as composer or performer; and often-when everything else is perfect-the defect lies at this very point. "If I could make you suffer for two years," said a teacher to a noted singer, "you would be the best contralto in the world." It follows with sure logic that no one can truly sing God's praises who does not adore God. No training of voice or touch can compass the divine secret of praise. The feeling of praise-not as mere feeling, but as solid conviction-must enter into the utterance or it lacks the one quality of highest effectiveness. It is said that the undevout astronomer is mad, but the undevout musician is an impossibility. If we fail to distinguish between what may be called fine and genuine rendering, it is because it is not always easy to distinguish between reality and unreality. What is the matter with the music? is a ques. tion often asked. The technical rendering may be faultless and the defect lie in that inmost centre whence are all the issues of life and power. In the nature of things there is the same reason for faith, consecration, devout feeling, and holy living in the choir as in the pulpit, and there is nothing unbecoming in the conduct and feeling of the preacher that is not equally unbecoming, and for the same reasons, in singers of the divine praises.

Any musical sound, however produced, immediately seeks to ally itself with other sounds, but it selects only those that are in agreement with it, and passes by all others. Strike a note on any instrument, and the sound will start into audible vibration other sounds, but only those harmonious with itself. Thus in the very depths of music there is planted this law of sympathy-like seeking like, and joining their harmonious forces. Hence it is that those who feel alike, and are keyed as it were in their nature to the same pitch, turn to music for expression, and, on the other hand, voices that blend lead to blended hearts. Love often has this origin and grows through the mingled song of two voices. Households that sing are the most sympathetic and harmonious in all their order. Christian altruism and mutuality find their highest expressions in song, and are fostered by it.

Upon the whole, men agree in the matter of music better than in anything else. Call a synod of all the churches-orthodox and heterodox, Puritan and Prelatical, Protestant and Catholic, and while they could not put ten words together in which they would agree, they would all unite in singing the Te Deum. The Prelatical churches certainly touch a great truth when they sing their creeds, for a creed is in reality for the heart, with which we believe unto salvation. Here we come close to the fact that music is a revelation of future perfection. That ultimate condition, will be one in which the separating power of evil is ended, and men have attained to the wisdom of love. They are no longer developed by antagonism and isolation, but under a law of mutuality. Then each life shares in the power and volume of every other, and the peculiar value and quality of each is wrought into a total of perfect unity. We search in vain for any expression or type of this des. tiny until we enter the higher fields of music, where it is written out with alphabetic plainness in the eternal characters and laws of nature. The united action of the full chorus and orchestra is a perfect

transcript, down to the last and finest particular, of perfected human society. The relation of voices to instruments and of instruments to each other, the variety in harmony, the obedience to law drawing its power from sympathetic feeling, the inspiration of a noble theme, the conspiring together to enforce a mighty feeling which is also a thought-we thus have an exact symbol of the destiny of humanity. If it is never reached, then indeed prophecy will have failed and love also; and then the noblest art we know will have turned into a delusion-a nourisher of sickly dreams-the chiefest vanity of a vain and meaningless world.

Music as an expression of feeling is a prophecy of that grander exercise of our nature for which we hope. It is the nature of feeling to express itself. Thought may stay behind silent lips, but when it becomes feeling it runs to expression. So far as we can reason from ourselves, we cannot believe that the universe sprang out of thought. Thought would not have made this mighty expression that we call creation; it is an expression of feeling-some infinite emotion that must find vent or the infinite heart will burst with its suppression. Music is an illustration of this law of our emotions, and is the natural expression of great and deep feeling. When great crises fall upon nations and oratory fails to give full vent to the heroic purpose of their hearts, some poet links hands with some composer, and so a battlehymn sweeps the armies on to victory-the fiery clangor of the Marseillaise, or the sad, stately rhythm of the John Brown hymn. History all along culminates in song. The summits of Jewish history, from Miriam to David, are vocal with psalms. There is nothing grand in thought, deep in feeling, splendid in action, but runs directly to song for expression. When feeling reaches a certain point, it drops the slow processes of thought and speech and mounts the wings of song and so flies forward to its hope. "O that I had wings as a dove;" the feet are too slow to bear us away from our sorrow to our rest. In the simplest life there is always this tendency of feeling, whether of joy or sadness, to voice itself in melody.

When night draws its curtain gloomily around us, and all the weariness of the day and the sadness of past years are gathered into one hour, forcing tears, idle but real, to our eyelids, deepening and swelling into a burden of despair, how naturally we turn to music for utterance and relief. Some gentle strain is sung by tender lips, or perchance some chord of harmony is wafted from the distance, and the sad spell is broken. Goethe makes a chance strain of an Easter hymn defeat the purpose of a suicide—a thought that Chopin has wrought into one of his Nocturnes. As in nature there is a resolution of forces by which heat becomes light, so emotion, of whatever sort, if entrusted to music, turns into joy. What a fact! Here is the world of humanity tossing with emotions-love, sorrow, hope-driving men hither and thither-and here is music ready to take these emotions up into itself where it purifies and sublimates them and gives them back as joy and peace. What alchemy is like this? how heavenly, how divine! If, in the better ages to come, there still be weariness, sorrow, disappointment, delayed hope, may we not expect that this transmutation of them into joy which goes on here, will continue to act there? We are moving on towards an age and a world of sympathy, and sympathy is the solvent of trouble. If so, there must be some medium or actualized form of sympathy, for there will never come a time when mind can act upon mind without some

In

medium, and the art-idea is probably eternal. some supernal sense, then, music will be the vocation of humanity when its full redemption is come. The summit of existence is feeling, the summit of character is sympathy, and music is the art-form that links them together.

Music is the truest and most nearly adequate expression of the religious emotions, and so becomes prophetic of the destiny of man as a religious being. The soul of the Christian religion," says Goethe, "is reverence." It is also the great, inclusive act or condition of man as he comes into perfection. Goethe adds, with profound suggestiveness, that it must be taught. The highest conception of the use of creation is as a tuition in reverence. Whatever else it may teach, it teaches this, or, if it fails in this, it teaches nothing. Materialism is breaking up and disappearing under the discovery of laws and processes and causes for which it has no explanation, and all things are resolving into mere symbols of will and mind and feeling. Already matter has eluded the touch of our senses, and our recognition of it as a thing in itself is a mere conventionality of speech. The resolution of it into force or motion, and of its processes into forms of thought, is a drawing out of more than every alternate thread from the veil that hangs between creation and its Source; the veil may never be wholly put aside, but it grows continually thinner, letting through revealing rays of truth and glory. When this process gets full recognition-as it surely will-and men become tired of the senseless play of agnostic phrases and catch-words, and philosophy triumphs as it always has triumphed and always will, there will be but one voice issuing from creation-the voice of praise, and but one feeling issuing from the heart of man-the feeling of reverence before the revealed Creator. Then the heart of man will require some form of expression for its mighty and universal conviction. We have already a great oratorio of the Creation, but we shall have a greater stillprofounder in its harmonies and more majestic in its ascriptions.

We have in music the art-form that is not only fitted to express our religious feelings, but is wholly fitted for nothing else. I mean that music is creatively designed for religion, and not directly for anything else. Like all great arts, it has a large pliancy through which it may be adapted to many uses. Music may be made degrading and a minister of sensuality or trivial pleasure, but never by its own consent, nor with a full use of its powers. When music is used to pave the way to vice, certain instruments are rigidly excluded, and the nobler tones are exchanged for "soft Lydian airs." This exclusion and perversion every true musician detects as a lack in the music itself, and the spirit of music-like a fettered Samson-pleads with him for a better use and fuller exercise of its nature. Such use of music is like the look of scorn in the face of beauty; no other face could express the scorn so well, but the beauty is still a protest against its use for such an end-it is made for something better. So music lends itself to almost every human feeling down to the vilest, but always with suppression of its power. It is not till it is used for the expression of that wide range of feeling which we call religious that it discloses its full powers. Then it is on its native heath; it gathers its full orchestra from the organ to the drum, from softest viols and flutes to tinkling cymbals, from instruments that are all passion to instruments of almost passionless dignity; then it covers the whole scale of its vast compass, from one pure note of voice or instrument to its highest possible combinations,

It is

from a slumber song to a hallelujah chorus. not a matter of fancy but a fact of science, that music never seems to be satisfied with itself except when it is used in a religious way; it is always seeking to escape into this higher form, even as man is himself. We hardly leave scientific ground when we say that music itself is a holy thing, and is always seeking to create holiness by some inherent law. It always strives to destroy and overcome its oppositenot by absolute destruction, but by conversion. Strike all the keys of a piano, and some strong righteous notes will gather up the agreeing notes, silence the others, and create a harmony out of the discord. When a rough, loud noise is made-like an explosion -the harmonious notes sift out and drop the discordant ones, so that the final vibration in the distance is no longer jarring noise, but soft and pleasing harmony. An over-refinement of thought this may seem, but it is no finer than the laws of nature. is, at least, an illustration of what it does in man, silencing the discord of his tossed life, and refining every sentiment and purpose into sweet agreement.

It

Beethoven put this process into musical form. In one of his symphonies, he opens with four full, strong chords from the entire orchestra; then the separate instruments begin to war upon them, strive to overpower them with the blare of trumpets, to drown them in the complexities of the violins, to silence them under the rattle of the drums; but the primal chords, yielding at times, still hold their own, gather force, reassert themselves, and at last overpower their antagonists by patient persistence and all-conquering sweetness, rise into full possession of the theme, and sweep on into harmonies divine in their power and beauty.

The truth that music is for religion is equally evident in the fact that nothing calls for it like religion. Men fight better under the stir of music, but they can fight well without it. Business does not require it. Pleasure craves it, but the voice and zest of young life supply its lack. It is not needed in the enacting of laws, nor in the pleadings of courts. It might be left out in every department of life save one, and nothing would be radically altered; there would be lack, but not loss of function. But religion as an organized thing and as worship, could not exist without it. When song dies out where men assemble for worship, the doors are soon closed. When praise is repressed and crowded aside for the sermon, the service sinks into a hard intellectual process for which men do not long care. Eloquence and logic will not take its place-why, it is difficult to say until it is recognized that music is the main factor of worship-a fact capable of philosophical statement, namely: worship being a moral act or expression, it depends upon the rhythm and harmony of art for its materials; they are the substances-so to speak-ordained by God and provided in nature out of which worship is made. And so the Church in all ages has flowered into song. It takes for itself the noblest instrument and refuses none. It draws to itself the great composers, whom it first attunes to its temper and then sets to its tasks, which invariably prove to be their greatest works. In no other field do they work so willingly and with so full exercise of genius. There is a freedom, a fulness and perfection in sacred composition to be found in no other field. In all other music there is a call for more or for something different, but the music of adoration leaves the spirit in restful satisfaction. Dryden, the most tuneful of poets, divided the crown between old Timotheus and the divine Cecilia, but surely it is greater to "draw an angel down" than "lift a mortal to the skies."

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