' Until the flames kindled

Until the flames kindled upon him!

Did you ever sit on a winter's evening before an old-fashioned open fireplace, with its blazing log of wood? As you sit there and watch the fire playing about the log, you begin to hear a soft sound, a clear musical note, perhaps; or a tender, quavering strain, plaintive and sad. It takes every tone as it sings on. Sometimes it is like a whole chorus of bird-songs; then again it dies away into a faint murmur.

What is it?

Are there birds hidden in the chimney, which give out these strange notes? Are there invisible spirits hovering about the room, that breathe out these plaintive strains? No, the music comes from the log in the fire. The flames bring the music out.

A poet would say that long ago in the forest, the birds sat on the branches of the tree from which this log was taken, and sang there, and the songs hid away in the wood, where they have remained ever since.

Or, he would say that the winds sighed and murmured through the branches in gentle summer breezes, or swept through them in furious storms — and that the music of the breezes and storms has been imprisoned in the heart of the tree all these many years. And now the fire brings out this long-slumbering music.

These are only poetic imaginations, so far as the curious music of the log on the hearth is concerned; but it is no mere imagination that the sweetest, fullest music, is not drawn out of us — until in the heat of trial . The bird notes of joy which warbled about our ears in the sunny days of childhood and youth — sink into the heart and hide there.

The lessons, the influences, the gladness, the peace of quiet — seem to have been lost. The life does not appear to yield its true measure of joyfulness. Then the fires of trial come and kindle about it, and in the flames, the long-gathered and imprisoned music is set free and flows out. Many a rejoicing Christian never learned to sing — until the flames kindled upon him! ====

"I have refined you in the furnace of suffering!" Isaiah 48:10

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