HENRY WARD BEECHER

“The Twenty-third Psalm is the nightingale of the psalms.  It is small, of a homely feather, singing shyly out of obscurity; but, oh, it has filled the air of the whole world with melodious joy, greater than the heart can conceive!  Blessed be the day on which that psalm was born!

“What would you say of a pilgrim commissioned of God to travel up and down the earth singing a strange melody, which, when once heard, caused him to forget whatever sorrow he had?  And so the singing angel goes on his way through all lands, singing in the language of every nation, driving away trouble by the pulses of the air which his tongue moves with divine power.  Behold just such an one!  This pilgrim God has sent to speak in every language on the globe.  It has charmed more griefs to rest than all the philosophy of the world.  It has remanded to their dungeon more felon thoughts, more black doubts, more thieving sorrows, than there are sands on the seashore.  It has comforted the noble host of the poor.  It has sung courage to the army of the disappointed.  It has poured balm and consolation into the heart of the sick, of captives in dungeons, of widows in their pinching griefs, of orphans in their loneliness.  Dying soldiers have died easier as it was read to them; ghastly hospitals have been illuminated; it has visited the prisoner and broken his chains, and, like Peter’s angel, led him forth in imagination, and sung him back to his home again.  It has made the dying Christian slave freer than his master, and consoled those whom, dying, he left behind, mourning not so much that he was gone as because they were left behind and could not go too.

“Nor is its work done.  It will go on singing to your children and my children, and to their children, through all the generations of time; nor will it fold its wings till the last pilgrim is safe, and time ended; and then it shall fly back to the bosom of God, whence it issued, and sound on, mingled with all those sounds of celestial joy which make heaven musical forever.”