Our Unitarian GospelSavage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Religion
Our Unitarian Gospel
Savage, Minot J. (Minot Judson)
Sermons; Unitarianism
There are times, like the present, when it seems as though the animal
were at the top, and the affectional nature suppressed, and the
conscience were ruled out of court; and yet you study the methods of
modern warfare as compared with those of the past, you see how pity and
tenderness and care walk by the side of every gun, hide in the rear of
every battlefield to attend to the wounded and suffering. And you know
what talk there has been of pity for the hungry, the desire of the
world to feed those that need; and the one dominant note in the
discussion of the war all over the world has been the question as to
its being right. No matter how we may have decided, whether the
decision be correct or not, the civilized world bows itself in the
presence of its ideal of right, and demands that no war shall be fought
the issue of which is not to be a better condition of mankind.
Evolution, then, tends to the development of brain, heart, conscience,
and the spiritual nature of man. It has left nothing behind that is of
any value to us. It has transformed or sublimed or lifted all up into
the higher range of the life that we are living to-day, and contains
within itself a promise of the higher and the grander life that we
reach forward to to-morrow.
I wish now, for a moment, to illustrate the working of this in regard
to some of the institutions of the world. If I had time, I could show
you that the same law is apparent in the development of the arts,
sculpture, painting, poetry. I must pass them by, however. As
illustrating what I mean, let me take the one art of music. From the
very beginning man has been interested in making some sort of sounds
which, I suppose, have been regarded as music by him. Most of those
that are associated with the barbaric man would be anything but music
to us. The music, for example, that they give in connection with a play
in a Chinese theatre would not be acceptable to the cultivated ear of
Americans. We have left behind much that the world called music. We
have left behind any number of musical instruments. We do not now have
those that the Psalmist makes so much of, the old-time harp, the
sackbut, the psaltery. I do not know, though you may, what kind of
instruments they were. The world has completely forgotten them, and
left them out of sight. And yet no musical note, no musical chord, no
musical thought, no musical feeling, has been forgotten or dropped
along the advancing pathway of the world's progress; and in our organs
all the attempts at instruments of that kind from the beginning of the
world are preserved, transformed and glorified. In our magnificent
orchestras all the first feeble beginnings are developed until we have
a conception of music to-day such as would have been utterly
incomprehensible to the primeval man. What I wish you to note is and
this is the use of my illustration that the advancing growth of the
music of the world has forgotten nothing that it was worth while to
keep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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