hink, miss, that a great person like
God cares whether we pray to him in a room or in a church?"

"No, I don't," answered Mary. "For my own part, I find I can pray best
at home."

"So can I," said Joseph, with solemn fervor. "Indeed, miss, I can't
pray at all sometimes till I get my fiddle under my chin, and then it
says the prayers for me till I grow able to pray myself. And sometimes,
when I seem to have got to the outside of prayer, and my soul is
hungrier than ever, only I can't tell what I want, all at once I'm at
my fiddle again, and it's praying for me. And then sometimes it seems
as if I lost myself altogether, and God took me, for I'm nowhere and
everywhere all at once."

Mary thought of the "groanings that can not be uttered." Perhaps that
is just what music is meant for--to say the things that have no shape,
therefore can have no words, yet are intensely alive--the unembodied
children of thought, the eternal child. Certainly the musician can
groan the better with the aid of his violin. Surely this man's
instrument was the gift of God to him. All God's gifts are a giving of
himself. The Spirit can better dwell in a violin than in an ark or in
the mightiest of temples.

But there was another side to the thing, and Mary felt bound to present
it.

"But, you know, Mr. Jasper," she said, "when many violins play
together, each taking a part in relation to all the rest, a much
grander music is the result than any single instrument could produce."

"I've heard tell of such things, miss, but I've never heard them." He
had never been to concert or oratorio, any more than the play.

"Then you shall hear them," said Mary, her heart filling with delight
at the thought. "--But what if there should be some way in which the
prayers of all souls may blend like many violins? We are all brothers
and sisters, you know--and what if the gathering together in church be
one way of making up a concert of souls?--Imagine one mighty prayer,
made up of all the desires of all the hearts God ever made, breaking
like a huge wave against the foot of his throne!"

"There would be some force in a wave like that, miss!" said Joseph.
"But answer me one question: Ain't it Christ that teaches men to pray?"

"Surely," answered Mary. "He taught them with his mouth when he was on
the earth; and now he teaches them with his mind."

"Then, miss, I will tell you why it seems to me that churches can't be
the places to tune the fiddles for tha