^ Buskin.
ii8 SONGS IN THE NIGHT
thou dost is as a song of praise, and the common business of thy life is a conforming to God's will on earth as angels do in heaven.^
^ I never awake in the middle of the night without feeling induced to commune with God. One feels brought more into contact with Him. The whole world around us, we think, is asleep. God the Shepherd of Israel slumbers not, nor sleeps. He is awake, and so are we ! We feel, in the solemn and silent night, as if alone with God. And then there is everything in the circumstances around you to lead you to pray. The past is often vividly recalled. The voices of the dead are heard, and their forms crowd around you. No sleep can bind them. The night seems the time in which they should hold spiritual commune with man. The future too throws its dark shadow over you — the night of the grave, the certain death-bed, the night in which no man can work. And then everything makes such an impression on the mind at night, when the brain is nervous and susceptible ; the low sough of the wind among the trees, the roaring, or eerie whish, of some neighbouring stream, the bark or low howl of a dog, a general impressive silence, all tend to sober, to solemnize the mind, and to force it from the world and its vanities, which then seem asleep, to God, who alone can uphold and defend.^
4. And what God gives He looks to us to render to Him again. The slightest vision of God begets in our hearts the desire to praise Him. Prayer is for ourselves, praise is for God. When we pray we really contemplate ourselves, and our own needs; when we praise we are gazing at God and at God only, and it is the sense of His infinite greatness, of His majesty, of His dominion, of His power, that compels us to burst into songs of praise and gratitude. Praise suggests melody, for this simple reason — that the contemplation of the greatness, and the glory, and the majesty of God fills our hearts with thoughts which are much too deep to be uttered in words. It is useless that we should enumerate God's perfections with our lips ; it is useless that we should try to express simply what we can understand, simply what we perceive. We naturally wish to express feelings which soar far beyond our power of expressing them in words. Thus it follows that the only mode of giving expression to such feelings is by music, is by the power of sound ; for remember, music is at once the most intimate and the most sublime of all the arts. It * William Law. ^ Dr. Norman Macleod, in Memoir by his brother, i. 151.
JOB XXXV. lo 119
has a power of expression which is peculiarly its own, and which goes beyond that of any other form of expression.
Why does man have recourse to music to express these fine thoughts of his heart ? He does so because it seems to him so free and unfettered. My lips, they stumble when I speak, I catch after words and I cannot find them ; but let me betake myself to song and the notes well forth, and the melody tells its own tale, and I am in a freer atmosphere, and I can soar aloft untrammelled by sordid considerations which perforce bind me down so long as I am merely trying to speak.
^ On Saturday I had a good bout at Beethoven's Quartetts — which I used to play with poor Blanco White — and thought them more exquisite than ever — so that I was obliged to lay down the instrument and literally cry out with delight. I really think it will add to my power of working, and the length of my life. I never wrote more than when I played the fiddle, I always sleep better after music. There must be some electric current passing from the strings through the fingers into the brain and down the spinal marrow. Perhaps thought is music.^
^ In almost his earliest poem. Browning wrote the wise advice :
Eespect all such as sing when all alone.
Let us sing with the understanding, and then there is scarcely any experience so uplifting as to offer a hymn to God ; to say in the soul, " My God and Father, here is my little offering of sweet and humble adoration." Public praise and secret praise are both powerful to bring the spirit into closer touch with God. On the wings of music we can soar into the vast region where
Time and sense seem all no more.
Some years ago I found a special method very profitable in private devotion. Beginning with the section of an old hymn-book that dealt with " believers praying," I set off two hymns for each day of the month. During the first month I marked the verses of special appealing power, and month after month I used to sing these selected verses. That, I found, was a strong method of obtaining a direct answer to the prayer, " Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right spirit within me." In such singing the right spirit is renewed.^