| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 6 |
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The gift of song is one of the noblest endowments bestowed upon mortals. But there is a music that is not vocal. Every one should be able to make music in the world though he or she cannot sing a note. Milton says, “that he who hopes to write well in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition of the best and the noblest things.” One cannot really sing songs that will be music in God’s ears, whose own life is not first, a song in its sweetness and beauty.
It is a great thing to write a hymn that lives. To have composed such a song as the Twenty-third Psalm, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” or “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” is one of the noblest achievements possible in the world. Think what a ministry such songs have had, how many lives they have blessed, how much sorrow they have comforted. No other human service can be more blessed than to be permitted to give to the world a sweet song, which shall go singing on its way through generations. Yet we cannot all write hymns. We are not all poets, gifted to weave sweet thoughts into rhythmic verse that will charm our souls. We cannot all make hymns, which shall become as angels of peace, comfort, joy, or inspiration to weary lives. Too only a few men and women in a generation is the poet’s tongue given.
But there is a way in which we may all make songs; we can make our own life a song if we will. It does not need the poet’s gift and art to do this, nor does it require that we shall be taught and trained in colleges and universities. The most unlettered person may live so that gentle music shall breathe forth from their life through all their days. They need only to be true and loving. Every beautiful life is a song.
There are many people who live in circumstances and conditions of hardness and hardship, and who seem to make no music in the world. Their life is of that utterly prosaic kind that is devoid of all sentiment, which has no place for sentiment amid its severe toils and under its heavy burdens. Even home tender-nesses seem to find little opportunity for growth in the long leisure-less days. Yet even such lives as these, doomed to hardest, dreariest toil, may and oftentimes do become songs, which minister blessing to many others.
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