Music the Child of Christianity

There is an art which Christianity created almost wholly, asking little of outside aid. Music is that peculiar child. The long-continued vision of Heaven, the struggle of the tones of voice and of instrument to find something worthy of the deep feelings of religion, resulted at last in those mighty chants which formed the mountain springs of our musical Nile. There could have been no music had not depth of feeling come to man. The men who went up to the pagan temples went with no such love, with no sorrow of penitence, with no exultant joy. It was necessary for Jesus Christ to come along and transfer religion from the form to the spirit, and from an "airy nothingness" to a love stronger than life, before hymns like those of Luther and Wesley and Watts could break from the heart. The doctrine of repentance must live in the world awhile before we can have a "Miserere," and the exultant hope of the Christian must come before the mind can invent a "Gloria." — SWING.

Wise Words — Souls Occupied with Great Ideas

1896

Instead of praying for effects, let us pray that we may be enabled to fulfill causes! — Professor Drummond.

Only he who puts on the garment of humility finds how worthily it clothes his life. — Phillips Brooks.

The best cure for sorrow is to sympathize with another in his sorrow. The cure for despondency is to lift the burden from some other heart. — Anon.

A soul occupied with great ideas best performs small duties; the divinest views of life penetrate most clearly into the meanest emergencies. — James Martineau.

There is no action of man in this life which is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as that no human providence is high enough to give us a prospect to the end. — Thomas of Malmesbury.

We are never without help. We have no right to say of any good work, it is too hard for me to do; or of any sorrow, it is too hard for me to bear; or of any sinful habit, it is too hard for me to overcome. — Elizabeth Charles.

There is no such thing as patriotic art and patriotic science. Both art and science belong, like all things great and good, to the whole world, and can be furthered only by a free and general interchanges ideas among contemporaries, with continual reference to the heritage of the past as it is known to us. — Goethe.

Exert your talents and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing while he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark. — Dr. Johnson.