Church Music | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 11, 1883

Church Music.

CONCERNING the much mooted question of allowing instrumental music in church, the Christian at Work offers the following:—

"Our friends so opposed to instrumental music ought to familiarize themselves with the doings of the ruddy-faced, red-haired, blonde young man who once became king of Israel. Amidst his pressing duties he wrote a book of spiritual songs, called the Psalms. His name was David; and having the Psalms, he got his singers together, and the stringed instruments and the wind instruments—drums, harps, psalteries, cymbals, trumpets, etc. And what a choir he had! No one ever did so much for church music as David. He changed matters more than any modern music committee ever did, getting together four thousand from whom to choose; and he had twenty-four bands of twelve each—two hundred and eighty-eight in all. If David had only known how to make a church organ, he would doubtless have had a magnificent instrument, casting into the shade the organs at Frieburg and Harlem and Liverpool—and such a cultivation of music would have brought out the Beethoven, Mozart, or Bach of his day, to play it. And that his music was not displeasing to the Lord is indicated by the fact that Solomon kept the choir up after David's death, and no disapproval is indicated at the work of either; in fact, the 150th Psalm shows David to have no regret for the part he took in promoting the use of instrumental music in the churches. But to-day—ah! to-day—the use of an organ is "blasphemy," and we are told old Satan is to be seen in some churches disguised as choir-master or organist. We fear Satan does get into churches sometimes. He has been seen in a pulpit. Sometimes he climbs up into the organ-loft. Sometimes he sits in the elder's seat. And he has been known to regularly occupy a pew and criticise the minister and the music."