THE SOUL
Poem★★★★In my boyhood there lived near my home a retired Scotch crofter. He was about eighty years of age when I knew him.
His wife was dead; his children, a goodly num- ber, had all left him to found homes of their own, leaving the old man, according to the bitter custom of necessity, absolutely alone. He was a musician, known for his skill in that simple community, and as an avocation he had learned to make violins. He had a score or more of them hanging around the walls of his humble little cottage. One day, so the old man told me, his favorite violin _ fell from his hands on the hearthstone.
It was broken into _ fragments. He gathered them together with pious tender- ~ ness and put them sorrowfully away, thinking that his be- loved violin would never again breathe beauty and song. In a day or two it occurred to him that the violin might be remade. He undertook the daring task; joined piece to piece and fragment to fragment, until the broken instru- ment was again whole and entire.
He laid it away to rest; he waited until the old wounds were surely healed. At last, in due time, he took his instrument, restrung and newly tuned, put the bow on it, played into it one love song after another, played through it the joy of the Re- deemer; and, to his amazement, the tone and the voice of 406 NEW SERMON: ILLUSTRATIONS his violin were inexpressibly deeper, richer, more tender, more appealing than the violin in its original power.
George A. Gordon.
The point
A story of an old Scottish violin-maker whose broken violin, when carefully repaired, produced richer, deeper, more tender tones than before—a parable of God's healing in broken lives.