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.
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