But in this appeal for a new song of praise to God there is something more than a recognition of new blessings.  The new song is not merely the response to new mercies and the tuneful celebration of recent good.  If there is to be ever a new note in the song, there must be ever a new note in the singer’s heart.  And this cometh not by observation, but by inspiration.  You may change the words of the song and it may still be the old song.  You may sing the same words and it may yet be a new song.  For as is the singer, so is the song.

O sing unto the Lord a new song. That is a plea for a deeper and a wider life.  It is a plea that sounds the depth of the heart and takes the measure of the soul.  The new song comes not of a truer enumeration of life’s blessings, but of a truer understanding of the blessedness of life itself.  The key to such understanding is character.  When by the grace of the clean heart and the enlightened and responsive spirit a man can get beneath the events of each day’s life and commune with that eternal law of love to which each one of those events bears some relation—­or had we not better say commune with the Eternal Father by whom that law exists?—­then is his song of praise ever new.  It is something to catch a glimpse of the mercy of God, and to think and feel as one has not thought or felt before about some part of life’s daily good.  But it is vastly more to learn to interpret the whole of life in the terms of the goodness of God.  The saint sings where the worldling sighs.  And if we find in that song only the apotheosis of courage and resignation, we have neither found the source of the song nor the message of it.  The new song comes not from the thrill of peril faced and defied, nor from the victorious acceptance of hard and bitter things.  It comes from that deep life of the soul in God, a life beyond the threat of peril and beyond the touch of pain.  It finds its deepest and freshest notes not in contemplating the new gains and good of any day, but in a growing sense of the timeless gain and eternal good of every day.

And if all this be so, it surely follows that the service of praise is not something unto which we may pass by one effort of the will or that depends upon the stimulus of outward experience.  It is conditioned rather by our character, and by our power to see the unveiled face of life reflecting always the light of perfect love.  And it is to produce in us the right character and the true insight that God disciplines us all our days.  It is to set a new song in our hearts.  Said a professor of music at Leipzig of a girl whom he had trained for some years and who was the pride of the Conservatoire, ’If only some one would marry her and ill-treat her and break her heart she would be the finest singer in Europe.’  He missed something in the song, and knew it could never come there save from the heart of the singer.  Trouble always strikes a new note in life, and often the deepest note that is ever struck.  But, be our experience joyous or sorrowful, the true end of it must ever be to deepen our own hearts that there may be in us ever a more catholic recognition of, and response to, the Eternal Love.