(with Revelation 15:3)
The highest forms under which we can now think are art-forms: the proportions of statuary and architecture, the colour 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 operation of music we find the same things; namely, obedience, sympathy, emotion, and adoration.
I. Obedience. The idea that is fastest gaining ground in all departments of thought is that of the reign of law law always and everywhere, and nothing without its range. But under what art-form shall we express this? for expression we must have. There is an exactness in the laws of harmony that makes obedience to them specially fine and so fit to be a type of it.
The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it, and it is full only as the obedience is entire.
II. Music is, beyond all other arts, the expression and vehicle of sympathy. 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. The united action of the full chorus and orchestra is a perfect transcript, down to the last and finest particular, of perfected human society.
III. 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. Music is an illustration of this law of our emotions, and is the natural expression of deep feeling. History all along culminates in song. The summits of Jewish history from Miriam to David are vocal with psalms. In some supernal sense, 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.
IV. 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. Music is creatively designed for religion, and not for anything else. It lends itself to almost every human feeling, down to the vilest, but always with suppression of its power. It is not until it is used for the expression of that wide range of feeling which we call religious that it discloses its full powers. Music is the art-path to God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
T. T. Munger, The Appeal to Life,p. 309.
References: Psalms 149:2. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvi., No. 963; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 266. Psalms 149:4. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 98; Sermons for Boys and Girls,p. 115; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 120.