Article September 15, 1951 Issue

"MAKING MELODY IN YOUR HEART"

LOUIS LE B. CHAPIN, JR.

"Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth: sing ye praises with understanding" (Ps. 47:6, 7).

In such words as these the Scriptures repeatedly exhort us to lift our hearts in spontaneous gratitude to God. Following their accounts of the last supper, both Matthew and Mark tell us that not until "they had sung an hymn" did the Master and his disciples go out into the Mount of Olives, into the testing of Gethsemane. All that was done in those last precious hours before Jesus' crucifixion had its special and essential purpose, and certainly this singing of a hymn was no exception. According to John's Gospel (chapter 14), Jesus' sense of the ministering presence of Love had led him, after their supper together, to comfort and strengthen his disciples. They were reluctant to leave the upper chamber, outside which were waiting new experiences, little understood, half feared. The hymn in which they finally joined must have helped them all to reach farther beyond the limits of their human understanding and prepare their hearts to receive the inevitable spiritual unfoldment.

Purposeful, too, is the singing of hymns in Christian Science services, so rightly provided for in the Manual of The Mother Church by our Leader, Mary Baker Eddy. Each hymn can and should embody for each participant the singing of "praises with understanding," the enlightened attesting to God's presence, imparting buoyancy to hearts however weighted with fear or discouragement. Paul admonished the Ephesians (5:18, 19), "Be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord."

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