"If you would, miss, perhaps then I might be able to learn. You see, I never was like other people. Mother was the only one that didn't take me for an innocent. She used to talk big things about me, and the rest used to laugh at her. She gave me her large Testament when she was dying, but, if it hadn't been for Ann, I should never have been able to read it well enough to understand it. And now Ann tells me I'm a heathen and worship my fiddle, because I don't go to chapel with her; but it do seem such a waste of good time. I'll go to church, though, miss, if you tell me it's the right thing to do; only it's hard to work all the week, and be weary all the Sunday. I should only be longing for my fiddle all the time. You don't think, 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."