Ephesians 5:19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; There is, indeed, little of what can be accurately called music in nature, for music is the Divine prerogative of human and angelic beings, and nature furnishes only the rude elements of music, the uncut diamonds, as it were, of sound. We may, indeed, say that the winds of God make music under the blue dome of His temple, "not made with hands"; music, sweet sometimes and soft as the waving of angel wings, or weird as when it sweeps the wild moors and mingles the multitudinous murmurs of the withered heather bells, or awful as when it roars among the mountain pines. And you may say that the sea makes music; now in the ripples that flash upon the shore, and now in the bursting of its stormy billows. And you may say that the thrush and the nightingale make music, or the lark when it becomes a singing speck in the summer heaven. And so the poets have sung of the music of nature; but, my brethren, the music is not in these outward things; where they sound to us like music it is because we are "making melody" of them in our hearts; happy for us if that melody be always "to the Lord." It is thus that David says, "Praise the Lord upon earth: ye dragons, and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapours: wind and storm, fulfilling His word," etc. Yet David knew that the music of heaven and earth was in itself deep silence. It was only the music of the cosmos, the music which the beauty and order of the universe awaken in the heart of man, and none had ever heard it, though the Jewish legend said that Moses was solely sustained by that music of the spheres when he spent those forty days upon the mount of God. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; |
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