Music | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 20, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 44.

Music.

RUBENSTEIN has been offered $125,000 for one hundred concerts, while a hundred years ago one of Mozart’s finest compositions hardly brought the price of one of Rubenstein’s tickets. Mozart himself, the great composer, was left to die at the age of thirty-six, in a garret, destitute of life’s barest necessities, and to be buried in a pauper’s grave. An exchange thinks that “an observant reader of the sunny side of life and humanity will find in this increase of the world’s appreciation of music, much to make him believe the world is growing upward into sunnier, gentler heights.”

Be not deceived, my friend. Let not the world be deceived by its abundant melodies and its growing appreciation of music into the thought that it is therefore growing better and more acceptable to God. Babylon was full of “all kinds of music” when God’s judgments overthrew it, and the Apocalyptic Babylon “that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth,” has a wonderful musical history ascribed to her, in Rev. 18, just as she sinks as a milestone to rise no more.

Solomon’s temple was never in such enjoyment of music as when he “turned his heart” from the Lord, and Jerusalem at its overthrow was not wanting in its musical appreciation. Let history tell us what age, what city, what nation, was ever wanting, either in musical genius or in appreciation of the same, when ripe for divine judgment.

We love music. We thank God for music. It is a blessed relic of Eden. But let not the world think that God will accept its adoration of music as a substitute for the adoration of his Son. Until facts point to the world’s increase of submission to Christ, it need not point to its love of music as a sign of its growing upward. With statistics showing twenty-five per cent. less of lawful marriages than forty years ago, according to the increase of population, and thirty-seven per cent. more of divorces, thirty-five per cent. more of suicides and murders, and a falling off of attendance at religious worship of fifty per cent., the fact that the world is growing more and more merry in the midst of its increasing horrifying crimes, and of its “more ungodliness,” is rather a proof of the growing dulness of its moral sensibilities.

The music that shines into the very soul of man as his heart becomes the “temple of the Holy Ghost” through faith in his adorable Redeemer, such as has voiced itself in Coronation and in Old Hundred, will roll on and on, with ever deepening swell’s and thrilling harmonies, till the eternal ages of the world to come shall gather up all the heaven-born melodies of the past, and the new strains of the “crowning day,” and give the ravished ear of the redeemed an endless feast of seraphic song. When the world gives evidence of growing production of such heavenly strains as redemption wakes, it will then indeed give evidence of “growing upward toward summer heights.” Till then let her glorying cease.—Pacific Missionary Advocate.