[PRAISE GOD BY SINGING.]
WE never heard Dr. Knox announce a song to be sung in public, while we were with him in Prince Edward Island, when he did not say, distinctly and very audibly, “We will praise God by singing,” etc. This opens out with the right idea. How grand and sublime to praise God in song! We ought to sing in worship, not for music, or even fine singing, but to praise God, to worship the Lord our God as an act of devotion to God. We ought not to enter into it with the heart set on music, either instrumental or any other sort, but on God and our gracious and merciful Lord Jesus the Christ. The words ought to be read frequently and a few words of comment on them, calling attention to the sense, the praises, thanksgiving and supplications. Then people who know not God will see, as many christians appear to fail to see, the propriety of the word in one of our hymns: “Let those refuse to sing who never knew our God.” It is a contradiction of all common sense of the very meaning of the worship in song, for those who never knew God, or who never even professed to be christians or tried to turn to God, to say nothing of vile characters, to attempt to enter in the worship in song.
We care not how well people sing if they praise God, give thanks and pour out their souls to him. Enter into the song with heart and soul, and sing out with full voices, enraptured with the theme of the song, Him whose praises they sing, the salvation he graciously gives and the immortality he proposes to bestow. The theme of the song is the great matter. To sing with the spirit and the understanding is commanded, and to teach and admonish in singing is also commanded. The main body of the singing now done is not with the spirit nor the understanding, nor is anything taught or any one admonished. This is no worship. Singing merely to make music is no more worship than performing on a piano or violin.
[CHRIST WILL COME.]
BUT that Christ will come—“that same Jesus”—as literally as he was seen go up into heaven from Mount Olivet, we entertain not one doubt. That the dead will be raised and pass the final judgment, after which the wicked will go away into everlasting punishment—into the fire of gehena, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched, at the same time that the righteous enter into life eternal—we entertain not one doubt. These are clear and awful matters of divine revelation, and the main matters to set forth and enforce on men, and not theories about these great matters. Is it true that a man may “lose his own soul?” that a man may be “cast into hell?” that “both soul and body” may be “destroyed in hell?” that wicked men “shall go away into everlasting punishment?” that they may be “tormented day and night, forever and ever?” Is it true that God “has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead?” Beyond all question, it is true. In raising Jesus from the dead, God has given assurance to all men that he will judge the world in righteousness. The assurance that God will judge the world in righteousness is the reason for repentance. He commands all men, everywhere, to repent, because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness.