| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 9 |
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Many of the sweetest joys of Christian hearts are songs which have been learned in the bitterness of trial. A story is told of “a little bird that will never learn to sing the song his master will have him sing, while his cage is full of light. He listens and learns a snatch of this, a trill of that, a polyglot of all the songs in the grove, but never a separate and entire melody of his own. But the master covers his cage and makes it dark all about him, and then he listens and listens to the one song he is to sing, and tries and tries, and tries again, until at last his heart is full of it. And then, when he has caught the melody, the cage is uncovered, and he sings it sweetly ever after in the light.”
It is often with our hearts as with the bird. The Master has a song to teach us, but we learn only a strain of it, a note here and there, while we catch up snatches of earth’s music, the world’s songs, and sing them with it. Then he comes and makes it dark about us till we learn the sweet song he would teach us. And, having once learned it in the deep shadows, we continue to sing it afterward, even in the brightest day of earthly joy. Many of the liveliest songs of peace and trust and hope which God’s children sing in this world they have been taught in the hushed and darkened chambers of sorrow.
In like manner, many of the rarest beauties of character are touches given by the divine Spirit in the hours of affliction. Many a Christian enters a sore trial, cold, worldly, unspiritual, with all the better and more tender qualities of his nature locked up in his heart like the beauty and fragrance in the bare and jagged tree in January; but he comes out of it with gentle spirit, mellowed, richened and sweetened, and with all the fragrant graces pouring their perfume about him. The photographer carries his picture back into a darkened room that he may bring out its features. The light would mar his delicate work. God brings out in many a soul its loveliest beauties while the curtain is drawn and the light of day shut out. The darkness does not tell of anger: it is only the shadow of the wing of divine love folded close over us for a little, while the Master adds some new touch of loveliness to the picture he is bringing out in our souls.
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