A SONGLESS FAITH | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 31, 1877

A SONGLESS FAITH.

THE religion of the Bible is a religion of song. The earliest deliverance of God’s people upon the borders of the Red Sea was celebrated with strains of triumphant exultation. Songs were interwoven with the Jewish worship, and the psalms are full of exhortations to praise and magnify the Lord in song. Heathenism, Mohammedanism, Brahminism, Buddhism, are not religions of song. The non-Christian and anti-Christian world have no songs to express the unfaith which they cherish. The bird has its carol, the lover his lay, the mourner his elegy, the patriot his ode, the bacchanal his maudlin song, but infidelity has nothing at all. Infidelity has no songs, for it has nothing to sing about. No hymns of joy rise from the hearts of those who walk in the murky shadows of sin and unbelief.

One day after having alluded to this fact in a public assembly, a skeptic came and promised to produce “an infidel hymn book” in the afternoon. He brought it,—a book compiled by an apostate minister, having nothing infidel in its title, and very little in its composition. It was made up of such infidel hymns as “Hail Columbia,” “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and various other secular songs, with now and then a parody upon some well-known hymn,—a word left out here and another added there,—giving the compiler about as much right to claim the authorship of the hymns as borrowing a pair of boots and cutting the straps off would give him to be considered a shoemaker; and this was the boasted “infidel hymn book” which was to confute the assertions we had made. We exhibited the book and reiterated our statements.

Infidelity is songless because it is joyless, lifeless, hopeless. What theme is there for song in a life full of trouble and a death which is an eternal sleep? The true utterance of infidelity’s emotions would be a wail of deep despair. Men who are “without God” are also “without hope” in this world. Men who are in bondage to Satan cannot sing the Lord’s songs in a strange land. Not until their feet are brought up out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, is the new song put in their mouths. Not until they are redeemed from the thralldom of sin and the power of Satan, can they sing the song of victory over their relentless foes.

Blot out Christianity, and erase what it has done, and everything that has been written from the inspiration of its joys and hopes, and the world would lose much of its music, and sink down in the silence of sullen despair. Ever since the angels sung above the plains of Bethlehem, the gospel of Christ has been the inspiration of the holiest and most rapturous song. Let infidels forsake their ways and turn to God, and they will soon learn to sing, for God our Maker giveth songs in the night.

The church of God came singing into the world. Shut up in a dungeon, and with feet fast in the stocks, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises at the midnight hour; and the religion of Christ has ever gone forth singing along its way, singing in the darkness of the prison, singing in the weariness of pilgrimage, singing amid the curling flames of fagot fires, singing while infidels have blasphemed and devils have opposed and bacchanals have rioted; and this voice of song shall never be hushed until “the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

And then, when the new song—the song of Moses and of the Lamb—shall roll like thunder peals throughout the universe of God, we shall find that the day of Christian song has just begun, and that when infidelity shall have breathed its last despairing wail of death, the tide of deep and holy melody shall roll along through endless years, “and every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them,” shall say, “Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever.” Rev. 5:13.—The Armory.