Favorite Songs and Hymns For School and Home, page: 0288

450 Of The World's Best Songs And Hymns, With Lyrics & Sheet music for voice & piano.

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	258                           FAVORITE SUMUS tUK A GRAND mistake of the old reasoners in their argu�ing for the goodness of God, was that they tried to prove that in the world there is more evidence of de�sign for happiness than there is of design for pain. Now that position can not be maintained. There is just as much evidence of a design to produce pain as to produce pleasure. For every adaptation of pleasure that you will show me I will undertake to show you one for pain. This life is clearly rudimentary. Men are here to be hammered into something of worth in the next state of existence. Pleasure is to be desired, or expected, but as incidental. Earth is not the place for pleasure. It is the place where men are fashioned for eternity. A piano factory is not the place to go in order to hear music. Suppose a man were to start for some great piano manufactory with the expectation of	SLHUUL. JUSIL) tiVMt.. being enchanted when there by innumerable Thalbcrgs. He goes along dreaming of the divine harmonies which will greet him when he approaches the place where these sweet-toned instruments are made. He antici�pates as much more of delight than Thalberg had given him, as there are more instruments in the factory than were on the boards of the concert hall. " I am going to the place where all those pianos are made," he says, as he hastens on. " They turn out hundreds of them in a day. Oh! how will all sweet, bewildering sounds entrance my senses when I draw near. Hymns and songs of never-wearying melody will sing out to me from every door and window." He comes in sight of the building, and instead of hymns and choral melo�dies, he hears harsh noises. There are heavy pound�ings, gratings, sawings, and raspings. There are legs,
	MY OWN NATIVE LAND.	Wm. B. Bradbury.
	uncouth and clumsy to be worked into proper size and gracefulness. There are strings to be tried, and sepa�rate parts to be fitted and knocked together; there are great, heavy packing-boxes to be made, and various other awkward and noisy work to be done. Tools are thumping about; cords and tackling rattling; plenty of confounding noises, but no music. The man stands and sees the workmen ply the hammer, and saw, and file, and punch, and chisel and auger; he sees dust, boards, and shavings flying in all directions. Clatter and clatter surround him. From the windows come broken bits of board, wire and iron; also all the dif�ferent notes of racket and din; but he hears no sweet melody. Then the man says in astonishment, " Do they call this a piano manufactory�this confused place,	full of all jangling noises? "No, no; this is no piano-producing establishment. This is only a dusty and noisy workshop." Yes, it is a workshop, where are being fashioned the instruments which, when touched by skillful fingers, have power to enchant the world. But it is not the platform on which they are to be played. Not there are they to give forth their sweet harmonies. We are in the workshop of humanity. We see evi�dences of this, turn which way we will. We must feel the mallet and the saw; the punch and the bore. We must be split and ground and worked smooth. The pumice and the sand-paper are for us, also, as well as for the things we fashion; and at last, when we are all set to�gether, polished, and attuned, we shall be played upoa by the music-waking influences of Heaven.�Beecher.