and the
follies of the week past, and probably of the sins and the follies of the
week to come; or the man who went with a clear conscience, and had the
heart to thank God for the green grass, and the shining river, and the
misty mountains sleeping far away, and notice the song of the birds, and
the scent of the flowers, as a little child might do, and know that his
Father in heaven had made all these?

Yes, my friends, Christ is very near us, though our eyes are holden by
our own sins, and therefore we see Him not. But just in proportion as a
man walks with God, just in proportion as the eyes of his soul are opened
by the Spirit of God, he recovers, I believe, the privilege which Adam
lost when he fell. He hears the Word of the Lord walking among the trees
of the garden in the cool of the day; and instead of trying, like guilty
Adam, to hide himself from his Maker, answers, with reverence and yet
with joy, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.

Nay, I would go further still, and say, Is not the righteous man
recompensed on the earth every time he hears a strain of noble music? To
him who has his treasure in heaven, music speaks about that treasure
things far too deep for words. Music speaks to him of whatsoever is
just, true, pure, lovely, and of good report, of whatsoever is manful and
ennobling, of whatsoever is worthy of praise and honour. Music, to that
man, speaks of a divine order and a divine proportion; of a divine
harmony, through all the discords and confusions of men; of a divine
melody, through all the cries and groans of sin and sorrow. What says a
wiser and a better man than I shall ever be, and that not of noble music,
but of such as we may hear any day in any street? "Even that vulgar
music," he says, "which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a
deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of God, the first
composer. There is something more of divinity in it than the ear
discovers. It is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole
world, and of the creatures of God. Such a melody to the ear as the
whole world, well understood, would afford to the understanding." That
man, I insist, was indeed recompensed on the earth, when music, which is
to the ungodly and unrighteous the most earthly of all arts, which to the
heathens and the savages, to frivolous and profligate persons, only
tempts to silly excitement or to brutal passion, was to hi