The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-03-13
Harp or Many Strings; lyg ]
By DR. FRANK CRAM

The phrase get from the most industrious of hymn smiths, Isaac Watts:
 Strange that n harp Of a thousand. strings Should keep us in tune So long. referring to you and me
 Considered as an instrument to play upon, man assumes a new, sharp interest.
 For man is not only citizen and a soul, a piece of the population and subject for the surgeons knife and the evangelist's zeal; he is also piano.
 He is an organ horn, a fiddle; likewise a photographic apparatus taking the most amazing moving pictures; an electric bat tery; book wherein past impressions are recorded. ,>... .
 Hence it is more important to learn to play him than it is to learn to play upon the harp and the pasel-tree," to use Mrs. Norrocks reading of the Scriptures.
 There's many a young lady taking piano lessons who would far better be putting in her time practicing how to learn to play upon the man. Not that young ladies don't play upon the man as it is; only they go at it clumsily, they don't know how, and hence produce some wracking discords.
 What an instrument a man is! have climbed all around through the insides of Il pipe organ and admired its maze of slats and strings and tubes; I have stood by and watched the tuner expose the entrails of the piano, criss-crossed with its myriad wires. and with its little felt thimbled fingers all ill a row; but man beats them all.
 Read in your anatomy about that little harp inside the ear and the tiny bones there to catch sound waves of the blood canals irriyating the whole mechanism; and of the nerve-telegraph wires along which dash countless messages hourly, that make the Western Union system look like child's play.
 And when you enter the soul-box, where pure thought and feeling are handled, you will agree that the man himself is more mar velous than anything he ever made.
 There are solo effects. Upon this instru- ment you can produce any pain, from itch ing to ngony; any pleasure, from the mildest comfort to the lOudest hee-haw. . Orchestrally taken, what massed results can be secured! Watch the orator inflaming the passions of a crowd Savonarola raising the Florentines to religious frenzy Patrick Henry fusing the delegates into flame of patriotism.
 What is the general, Napoleon or Frederick, but band-master directing his companies if they were groups of first yiolins or 'cellos?
 And the architect; he plays upon dead things and living workers; as he waves his baton, stones leave their quarry and trees their native woods: hOrdes of bricklayers. plasterers, carpenters, teamsters, artists and artisans come trooping; till at last the ca thedral rises, the long sweet symphony of centuries. No wonder Schelling called archi- lecture frozen music"
 What fingers play me! Love, hate, am bition, aspiration, despair!
 God himself does not disdain to make on me his celestial melodies.
 Let me therefore be in tune. Evil spirits within and without are eager to strike forth from my strings their raucous eacophsnies. Angels of grace touch me to their perfect strains. Let me therefore be so in tune that l may catch the humber songs of things, so that
 To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears; and that may echo back something of that starry strain above, where
 Not the smallest orb that thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims!