Heartstrings and Their Melody
By LOUIS ALBERT BANKS (1855-1933) There is no musical instrument so sensitive as the human heart, and none that is open to such a diversity of influence. How many are the players who touch our hearts!
“There went with him a band of men, whose hearts God had touched.”
—1 Sam. 10:26
To move men to action immediate and earnest you need only to arouse their hearts. The heart it is that furnishes life to all the body. The relation of the heart to a human life is like the relation of a great city to a State. Out from the city run railroad lines and telegraph and telephone lines, commercial and intellectual arteries through which flows the blood to sustain and carry on civilization to the remotest boundary. The heart is like that. It is the center of human action. The appeal of the Bible is to the heart. There are many accidents of time and place and position; but after all as a man “thinketh in his heart, so is he.” There is no musical instrument in the world so sensitive as the human heart, and none that is open to such a diversity of influence. How many are the players who touch our hearts!
Sometimes anger touches them, and the tones which are evoked are coarse and full of discord; sometimes sorrow touches them, and they wail forth a miserere so tender and sad that it only finds its appropriate echo in tears. Satan plays on many a heart; but the heart does not belong to him. He is an invader and an enemy, and his touch can only produce discord. Nothing but the touch of God can bring forth perfect music from the human heart. Let us bring our hearts be- fore the Lord and bow before His inspection.
Let us study briefly the fruits of God's touch upon human hearts.
The first result is sympathy. We may see that illustrated in the incidents surrounding our text. Saul had been selected by the prophet, under God's direction, to be king over Israel. He was a bashful, young, timid fellow, and when the prophet wanted to introduce him to the people as their king he was not to be found, until after long search they discovered him hidden away among the pack saddles and "stuff,” as the Scripture record gives it, of the encampment. And when they had brought him forth to receive his crown and he stood and he stood up there before them, head and shoulders taller than everybody else, looking every inch a king, bashful though he was, they cheered him with admiration and pride.
And when the people were disbanded to go to their homes, and Saul also started on his journey, there were many men in the company whose hearts God so touched in sympathy with the young king that they went up with him to protect him and defend him. What we need to-day, above everything else, is that the great heart of mankind shall be touched into sympathy and fellowship. We need this continual touch of God in the Church, that its refreshing streams of sympathy may never dry up. No formal religion can ever take the place of warm-hearted, brotherly kindness.
In 1878 a party of Americans made a journey up the Nile, and afterward traveled through Egypt, Arabia, and Syria. When they were at Cairo preparing to cross the desert, each of the party bought some water vessels. One found in the bazaar beaten jars of brass, whose fine designs attracted him; another bought some painted porcelain vessels of great beauty; while a third came back with coarse earthen bottles at which the others laughed. “Wait until the end of the journey,” he said. The way across the desert was long and wearisome; the heat was intense; some of the camels fell sick; and hence the distance between the stopping places required more time than usual. Every drop of water was of value. The glittering brass vessels soon proved useless, as the water in them was heated and became impure and poisonous. The fine porcelain jugs cracked in the fierce heat of the sun, and the water was lost. Both the brass and porcelain vessels were thrown away as valueless; but the plain earthen bottles, being porous and unadorned, kept the water comparatively cool and pure until the end of the journey.
“It was not vases for ornaments that were needed," said the guide, “only a vessel that would carry water.”' So if we are to bless the world constantly by the warmth of our sympathy, the good cheer of our brotherly fellowship, we do not want to smother our faith and hope and love under decorated forms or incase our Christian graces in a bigotry as hard and unbending as brass; but, rather, we want to carry God's love into hearts so humble that it shall become in them a “well of water, springing up unto everlasting life.”
No one can measure the power of a genuine exhibition of brotherly sympathy. At the battle of Fair Oaks, on June 1, 1862, General Oliver 0. Howard had his arm shot off on the battlefield. As he was making his way to the hospital, weak from loss a of blood and pain, he saw a young man intoxicated. He was so under the influence of whisky that he could hardly walk. As the general came near him, he forgot the awful pain that was racking his body, and his own desperate condition, and his heart went out in sympathy for this poor drunken young lad; and he stopped long enough to tell him that it did not pay to drink, that it would ruin him, and how much better it would be to stop before the habit had control of him.
General Howard passed on to the hospital, had his arm amputated, and was sent home to recover. He learned nothing more of the drunken soldier for a great many years, when one day a letter came to him from Washington city which told him his subsequent history. The poor fellow, drunk as he was, was so impressed by the fact that the general, in his wounded condition, had taken enough interest in him to stop and give him advice, that he had then and there resolved to quit drinking. He kept his resolution and when the war was over settled down to a life of steady, honest, hard work. He gradually rose, and became finally a judge on the supreme bench of the State of New Hampshire and one of the foremost men in the Commonwealth. And he no doubt owed it all to the fact that this great-hearted Christian soldier had paused to pour on him the wealth of his Christian sympathy.
Victor Hugo says that whenever it is necessary we must sacrifice for our brother, no matter how lowly his condition, our gold, and our blood which is more than our gold, and our thought which is more than our blood, and our love which is more than our thought. And we are sure that this is the spirit in which St. Paul lived when we hear him saying: “For though I was free from all men, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more. And to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, not being myself under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; to them that are without law, as without law, not being without law to God, but under law to Christ, that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak: I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some.”
Paul states the supreme law of the kingdom of Christ to be, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them." How the old earth would blossom as the rose if all our hearts were touched into that Christlike sympathy!
Another result of God's touch upon the human heart is that he establishes it in courage—not a brutal, stoical courage, but the quieter, sublimer courage of confidence and faith. Bishop Potter, of New York city, relates a most striking incident which occurred when he was traveling some years ago in southern Florida. There was a man in the rail car who represented the great lottery system of Louisiana, which was then at the height of its infamous power and held the government of Louisiana in its iron grasp. This man was a very important personage in his own eyes. He had taken the drawing-room on the car, and something about the room gave him offense. He summoned the colored porter and, after addressing him in the most vulgar and profane manner, sent for the conductor.
There was obviously no grievance in the case; the man had lost his temper, was irritable and unreasonable from last night's debauch, and, if possible, his language to the conductor was more brutal and more insolent and unwarranted than to the porter. The bishop sat through it all, and was conscious of sensations tingling at the tips of his fingers that were entirely unepiscopal and which, to use his own words, “if they could have found expression at the moment, would have landed me in eternal disgrace." The conductor, who was a young man, a generous type of the Southerner, came to the bishop when it was all over and said, “I beg your pardon, but you have seen what has happened?” “Yes," the bishop replied, “and if you want to refer to me have no hesitation about doing so. I want to congratulate you on the spirit you have shown, and thank you for an exhibition of good manners in the face of the boor who insulted you every time he spoke, and to felicitate you for the dignity with which you have borne this.”
“O, sir," the young man replied, “when a man has come to learn how his Master controlled himself he ought to be ashamed not to be able to illustrate at least an equal control under less painful and trying circumstances. Bishop Potter declares that that was the finest testimony to the power of the religion of Jesus Christ to which he had ever been privileged to listen. That young man was a hero. It took more courage to do what he did than to march up to the cannon's mouth in the midst of battle. What a glorious thing it is to live under the spell of that divine leadership where such sublime courage is born of the hope and faith and love which are the atmosphere of one's daily life!
The supreme result of God's touch on our hearts is self-denial. The law of the Christian life is proclaimed in the Master's words, that he that loses his life shall find it, and he that keepeth his life shall lose it; upon which Dr. Brooke Herford comments that the highest, sweetest zeal of life is not in what we do in thinking of self, but in what we do for others, forgetting self. It is so even while in the doing How much more afterward! Life passes on; years wane; strength fails; the shows and vanities and delusions of life wither and fall, like autumn leaves. The only things that do not fade are those we do in simple, self-forgetting lovingkindness to our fellow-men or in self-forgetting thanksgiving to God. This self-forgetfulness is the true philosophy of the Christian life.
No doubt some of you feel like saying, “Ah! that perfect unselfishness is beyond my reach; I cannot forget myself so entirely as Christ seems to put it.” But have you begun rightly to undertake it? You do not send your boy to the high school before he has gone to the grammar school or to the primary. So we are put to school in this Christian life on earth. Enter upon it in this spirit, think of others, give up your wish for others, help others, be kind to others in every way you can, and every such thought and care and kindness in which you unawares rise into this forgetfulness of self will be a lifting up of your life and make it more worth living.
You ought not to think that Christ's teachings are not practicable for this world and for your life, because you cannot rise above mistakes and blunders and practice them perfectly all at once. What is there in the world that is worth doing that you can do perfectly all at once? But you may depend upon it that these plain, heart-searching teachings of Jesus Christ, which call for self-denial and self- forgetfulness, are the true light of life, and their way is the way of all blessing; and if you will live that way, if you will live toward them, the more you do the more they will bless you.
Be Christ's disciple in the way of self-denial, and, though it may begin with a cross, it will end with a crown. You may have to begin with some pain of self- denial ; but you will end in the quiet joy of self- forgetfulness. And more and more you will grow into that higher life in which our hearts go out lov- ingly to our fellow-men, and out toward all the beauty and glory of the world, and up toward God and toward that life which whoso lives with him shall live forever!
.
END
.
.
.
For a complete list of all our Classic Sermons, Click Here.
.
.For the latest headlines, op-eds and Bible Articles…News For Christians
.
.
.