We do wish that all the preachers and communities calling us to hold meetings for them would have wisdom and faith enough to say, bring a
first-class singer with you. Some of them do, but the majority write, We
do not need a singer; our home talent is amply sufficient.
O that home talent! At first we were quite impressed with the expression
or phrase. We saw masters and mistresses of song, Jenny Linds in
disguise, all tuned up and waiting to burst forth in floods of melodious
praise, that would fairly transport the audience, and be as well a profound
inspiration to the evangelist.
In some cases the home talent, taking no stock in full salvation, or any
other kind of redemption would present a line of frozen figures and icy
faces on the Sabbath, and be seen no more until the following Sunday.
In other instances, the home talent could more properly be called the
home talons, the way their discordant and out-of-tune voices tore and rent
the hearing of the ear and the sensibilities of the soul. In one of our
meetings, while several nasal voices were yowling like a certain domestic
pet that we shall not name, a poor little kitten, evidently attracted by the
sound, came in from the street and walked down the aisle in the direction
of the home talent. We had a lively suspicion at the time that the kitten
labored under a mistake and thought it had heard the voice of its mother.
The home talent confines itself to hymns that have been sung out of all
their freshness and force for ten or twenty years. The leader, or preacher,
will sweetly announce to the audience that they will sing pieces that
everybody knows. Whereupon the well-worn, often-threshed melodies
are rendered in connection with certain flat or falsetto accompaniments,
and the effect mental, moral, physiological, psychological, neurological
and craniological can well be imagined.
It stands to reason in this age of specialties, that a man who puts his all in
the work of conducting the singing of a religious gathering or meeting, will
do far better than a cluster of young or old folks who know little of music
and nothing about revival work. Then we should never forget that the
Spirit is giving new songs continually to the church, and that in addition
to the power the Holy Ghost bestows to the hymn there is another force
still which arises from its newness and freshness.
Living Illustrations By B. Carradine.
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