H ir 'd -¿{H Wsary
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Us1, Joseph , PmFk@i?
Text.—The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, th at I should know how to speak a word in season to him th at is weary.—Isaiah 50:4.
HE POWER of speaking to the weary is nothing less than a divine gift. As we see the divinity in our gifts shall we be careful of them, thankful
You can sing mechanically, exactly, prop erly, with right time, right tune, but really and truly you can not sing. Here is a man with his music and with the words; he sings every note, pronounces every word, goes through his lesson, finishes his task, and nobody wants to hear him any more. Another man takes up the same music, the same words, and the same hearers exclaim, “Oh, that he would go on forever!” How is that?—the words exactly the same, the notes identical—-how? Soul, fire, ever burning, never consuming, making a bush like a planet. The great difficulty in all such cases is the difficulty of transferring to paper a proper or adequate conception of the power of the men who thus sway the human heart. There are some men whose biographies simply belie them, and yet every sentence in the biography is true in the letter; but the biography is little else than a travesty and a caricature, because the power was personal, it was in the face, in the voice, in the presence, in the gait, in the touch—an incommunicable power;
for them: every gift seems to enshrine the giver, God. But how extraordinary that this power of speaking to the weary should not be taught in the schools. It is hot within the ability of man to teach other men how to speak to the weary-hearted, the wounded in spirit, the sore in the inner most feelings of the being. But can we lay down directions about this and offer sug gestions ? Probably so, but we do not touch the core of the matter. There is an infinite difference’ between the scholar and the genius. The scholar is made, the genius is inspired. Information can be im parted, but .the true sense, the sense that feels and sees God, is a gift direct from heaven. It is a common notion that anybody can sing. Why can you sing? Why, because 1 have been taught. That is your mistake.
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