203. The Ear
The Ear
Psa_94:9 : ’93He that planted the ear shall he not hear?’94
Architecture is one of the most fascinating arts, and the study of Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish and Renaissance styles of building has been to many a man a sublime life-work. Lincoln and York cathedrals, St. Paul’92s and St. Peter’92s, and Arch of Titus, and Theban Temple, and Alhambra and Parthenon are the monuments to the genius of those who built them. But more wonderful than any arch they ever lifted, or any transept window they ever illumined or any Corinthian column they ever crowned, or any Gothic cloister they ever elaborated, is the human ear. No one but the infinite God could have fashioned it.
Among the most skilful and assiduous physiologists of our time have been those who have given their time to the examination of the ear and the studying of its arches, its walls, its floor, its canals, its aqueducts, its galleries, its intricacies, its convolutions, its divine machinery, and yet it will take another thousand years before the world comes to any adequate appreciation of what God did when he planned and executed the infinite and overmastering architecture of the human ear. The most of it is invisible, and the microscope breaks down in the attempt at exploration. The cartilage which we call the ear is only the storm-door of the great temple clear down out of sight, next door to the immortal soul. Such scientists as Helmholtz and Le Conte and de Blainville and Ranke and Buck have attempted to walk the Appian Way of the human ear, but the mysterious pathway has never been fully trodden but by two feet’97the foot of sound and the foot of God. Three ears on each side the head’97the external ear, the middle ear, the internal ear’97but all connected by most wonderful telegraphy.
The external ear in all ages adorned by precious stones or precious metals. The Temple of Jerusalem was partly built by the contribution of earrings; and Homer in the Iliad speaks of Hera wearing three bright drops, her glittering gems suspended from the ear; and many of the adornments of our day are only copies of ear jewels found today in Pompeiian museum and Etruscan vase. But while the outer ear may be adorned by human art, the middle and the internal ear are adorned and garnished only by the hand of the Lord God Almighty. The stroke of a key of this organ sets the air vibrating, and the ear catches the undulating sound, and passes it on through the bonelets of the middle ear to the internal ear, which is filled with liquid, and that liquid again vibrates until the three thousand fibres of the human brain take up the vibration and roll the sound on into the soul.
A part of the ear is called by physiologists ’93the hammer,’94 for it is something to strike, and another part of the ear is called ’93the anvil,’94 for it is something to be smitten, and another part is called ’93the stirrup,’94 because it is like the stirrup of the saddle with which we mount the steed, and another part is called ’93the drum,’94 for it is something to be beaten into sound. Coiled like a snail shell, by which one of the innermost passages of the ear is actually called; like a stairway, for the sound to ascend; like a bent tube of a heating apparatus, taking that which enters round and round; like a labyrinth with wonderful passages into which the thought enters only to be lost in bewilderment. The middle ear filled with air, the medium of the sound as it passes to the internal ear filled with liquid’97a muscle contracting when the noise is too loud, just as the pupil of the eye contracts when the light is too glaring. The external ear is defended by wax, which, with its bitterness, discourages insectile invasion. The internal ear imbedded in what is by far the hardest bone of the human system, a very rock of strength and defiance.
The ear is so strange a contrivance that, by the estimate of one scientist, it can catch the sound of seventy-three thousand seven hundred vibrations in a second. The outer ear taking in all kinds of sound, whether the crash of an avalanche, or the hum of a bee. The sound passing to the inner door of the outside ear, halts until another mechanism, divine mechanism, passes it on by the bonelets of the middle ear, and coming to the inner door of that second ear, the sound has no power to come farther until another divine mechanism passes it on through into the inner ear, and then the sound swims the liquid until it comes to the rail-track of the brain branchlet, and rolls on and on until it comes to sensation, and there the curtain drops, and a hundred gates shut, and the voice of God seems to say to all human inspection: ’93Thus far and no farther.’94
In this vestibule of the palace of the soul, how many kings of thought, of medicine, of physiology, have done penance of lifelong study and got no farther than the vestibule. Mysterious home of reverberation and echo. Grand Central Depot of sound. Headquarters to which there come quick dispatches, part the way by cartilages, part the way by air, part the way by bone, part the way by water, part the way by nerve’97the slowest dispatch plunging into the ear at the speed of one thousand and ninety feet a second.
The ear is the small instrument of music on which is played all the music you ever hear, from the grandeurs of an August thunderstorm to the softest breathings of a flute. Small instrument of music, only a quarter of an inch of surface and the thinness of one two hundred and fiftieth part of an inch, and that thinness divided into three layers. In that ear musical staff, lines, spaces, bar and rest. A bridge leading from the outside natural world to the inside spiritual world; we seeing the abutment at this end the bridge, but the fog of an unlifted mystery hiding the abutment on the other end the bridge. Whispering gallery of the soul. The human voice is God’92s eulogy to the ear. That voice capable of producing seventeen trillion, five hundred and ninety-two billion, one hundred and eighty-six million, forty-four thousand, four hundred and fifteen sounds, and all that variety made, not for the regalement of beast or bird, but for the human ear.
You remember that Tuesday, in Venice, when there lay down in death one whom many consider the greatest musical composer of the century. Struggling on up from six years of age, when he was left fatherless, Wagner rose through the obloquy of the world, and oftentimes all nations seemingly against him, until he gained the favor of a king, and won the enthusiasm of the opera-houses of Europe and America. Struggling all the way on to seventy years of age, to conquer the world’92s ear.
In that same attempt to master the human ear and gain supremacy over this gate of the immortal soul, great battles were fought by Mozart, Gluck and Weber, and by Beethoven and Meyerbeer, by Rossini and by all the roll of German and Italian and French composers’97some of them in the battle leaving their blood on the keynotes and the musical scores. Great battle fought for the ear, fought with baton, with organ-pipe, with trumpet, with cornet-a-piston, with all ivory and brazen and silver and golden weapons of the orchestra; royal theatre and cathedral and academy of music the fortresses of the contest for the ear. England and Egypt fought for the supremacy of the Suez Canal, and the Spartans and Persians fought for the defile at Thermopylae, but the musicians of all ages have fought for the mastery of the auditory canal and the defile of the immortal soul and the Thermopylae of struggling cadences. For the conquest of the ear, Haydn struggled on up from the garret, where he had neither fire nor food, on and on until under the too great nervous strain of hearing his own oratorio of the ’93Creation’94 performed, he was carried out to die; but leaving as his legacy to the world one hundred and eighteen symphonies, one hundred and sixty-three pieces for the barytone, fifteen masses, five oratorios, forty-two German and Italian songs, thirty-nine canzonets, three hundred and sixty-five English and Scotch songs with accompaniment, and one thousand five hundred and thirty-six pages of libretti. All that to capture the gate of the body that swings in from the tympanum to the snail shell lying on the beach of the ocean of the immortal soul.
To conquer the ear, Handel struggled on from the time when his father would not let him go to school, lest he learn the gamut and become a musician, and from the time when he was allowed in the organ loft just to play, after the audience had left, one voluntary, to the time when he left to all nations his unparalleled oratorios of ’93Esther,’94 ’93Deborah,’94 ’93Samson,’94 ’93Jephthah,’94 ’93Judas Maccabeus,’94 ’93Israel in Egypt’94 and the ’93Messiah,’94 the soul of the great German composer still weeping in the dead march of our great obsequies and triumphing in the raptures of every Easter morn.
To conquer the ear and take this gate of the immortal soul, Schubert composed his immortal ’93Serenade,’94 writing the staves of the music on the bill of fare in a restaurant, and went on until he could leave as a legacy to the world over a thousand magnificent compositions in music. To conquer the ear and take this gate of the soul’92s castle, Mozart struggled on through poverty until he came to a pauper’92s grave; and one chilly, wet afternoon the body of him who gave to the world the ’93Requiem’94 and the ’93G-minor Symphony’94 was crunched in on the top of two other paupers into a grave which to this day is epitaphless.
For the ear everything mellifluous, from the birth hour when our earth was wrapped in swaddling clothes of light and serenaded by other worlds, from the time when Jubal thrummed the first harp and pressed a key of the first organ down to the music of this Sabbath morning. Yea, for the ear the coming overtures of heaven; for whatever other part of the body may be left in the dust, the ear, we know, is to come to celestial life; otherwise, why the ’93harpers harping with their harps?’94 For the ear, carol of lark and whistle of quail and chirp of cricket and dash of cascade and roar of tides oceanic and doxology of worshipful assembly and minstrelsy, cherubic, seraphic, and archangelic. For the ear, all Pandean pipes, all flutes, all clarionets, all hautboys, all bassoons, all bells, and all organs’97Luzerne and Westminster Abbey and Freyburg and Berlin and all the organ pipes set across Christendom, and great Giant’92s Causeway for the monarchs of music to play on. For the ear, all chimes, all ticking of chronometers, all anthems, all dirges, all glees, all choruses, all lullabies, all orchestration.
Oh, the ear!’97the God-honored ear!’97grooved with divine sculpture and poised with divine gracefulness and upholstered with curtains of divine embroidery, and corridored by divine carpentry, and pillared with divine architecture, and chiseled in bone of divine masonry, and conquered by processions of divine marshaling. The ear! A perpetual point of interrogation, asking how; a perpetual point of apostrophe, appealing to God. None but God could plan it; none but God could build it; none but God could work it; none but God could keep it; none but God could understand it; none but God could explain it. Oh, the wonders of the human ear!
How surpassingly sacred the human ear. You had better be careful how you let the sound of blasphemy or uncleanness step into that holy of holies. The Bible says that in the ancient temple the priest was set apart by the putting of the blood of a ram on the tip of the ear, the right ear of the priest. But, my friends, we need all of us to have the sacred touch of ordination on the hanging lobe of both ears, and on the arches of the ears, on the eustachian tube of the ear, on the mastoid cells of the ear, on the tympanic cavity of the ear, and on everything from the outside rim of the outside ear clear in to the point where sound steps off the auditory nerve and rolls on down into the unfathomable depths of the immortal soul. The Bible speaks of ’93dull ears,’94 and of ’93uncircumcised ears,’94 and of ’93itching ears,’94 and of ’93rebellious ears,’94 and of ’93open ears,’94 and of those who have all the organs of hearing and yet who seem to be deaf, for it cries to them: ’93He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’94
To show how much Christ thought of the human ear: He one day met a man who was deaf, came up to him and put a finger of the right hand into the orifice of the left ear of the patient, and put a finger of the left hand into the orifice of the right ear of the patient, and agitated the tympanum, and startled the bonelets, and with a voice that rang clear through into the man’92s soul, cried: ’93Ephphatha!’94 and the polyphoid growths gave way, and the inflamed auricle cooled off, and that man who had not heard a sound for many years, that night heard the wash of the waves of Galilee against the limestone shelving. To show how much Christ thought of the human ear, when the apostle Peter got mad and with one slash of his sword dropped the ear of Malchus into the dust, Christ created a new external ear for Malchus, corresponding with the middle ear and the internal ear, that no sword could clip away. And to show what God thinks of the ear, we are informed of the fact that in the millennial June which shall roseate all the earth, the ears of the deaf will be unstopped, all the vascular growths gone’97all deformation of the listening organ cured, corrected, changed. Every being on earth will have a hearing apparatus as perfect as God knows how to make it, and all the ears will be ready for that great symphony in which all the musical instruments of the earth shall play the accompaniment, nations of earth and empires of heaven mingling their voices together, with the deep bass of the sea and the alto of the winds, and the barytone of the thunder: ’93Alleluia!’94 surging up meeting the ’93Alleluia!’94 descending.
Oh, yes! my friends, we have been looking for God too far away instead of looking for him close by and in our own organism. We go up into the observatory and look through the telescope and see God in Jupiter and God in Saturn and God in Mars; but we could see more of him through the microscope of an aurist. No king is satisfied with only one residence, and in France it has been St. Cloud and Versailles and the Tuileries, and in Great Britain it has been Windsor and Balmoral and Osborne. A ruler does not always prefer the larger. The King of earth and heaven may have larger castles and greater palaces, but I do not think there is any one more curiously wrought than the human ear. The heaven of heavens cannot contain him, and yet he says he finds room to dwell in a contrite heart, and, I think, in a Christian ear. We have been looking for God in the infinite; let us look for him in the infinitesimal. God walking the corridor of the ear, God sitting in the gallery of the human ear, God speaking along the auditory nerve of the ear, God dwelling in the ear to hear that which comes from the outside, and so near the brain and the soul he can hear all that occurs there. The Lord of hosts encamping under the curtains of membrane. Palace of the Almighty in the human ear. The rider on the white horse of the Apocalypse thrusting his hand into the loop of bone which the physiologist has been pleased to call the stirrup of the ear.
Are you ready now for the question of my text? Have you the endurance to bear its overwhelming suggestiveness? Will you take hold of some pillar and balance yourself under the semi-omnipotent stroke? ’93He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?’94 Shall the God who gives us the apparatus with which we hear the sounds of the world, himself not be able to catch up song and groan and blasphemy and worship? Does he give us a faculty which he has not himself? Doctors Wild and Gruber and Toynbee invented the acoumeter and other instruments by which to measure and examine the ear, and do these instruments know more than the doctors who made them? ’93He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?’94
Jupiter of Crete was always represented in statuary and painting as without ears, suggesting the idea that he did not want to be bothered with the affairs of the world. But our God has ears. ’93His ears are open to their cry.’94 The Bible intimates that two workmen on Saturday night do not get their wages. Their complaint instantly strikes the ear of God: ’93The cry of those that reaped hath entered the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.’94 Did God hear that poor girl last night as she threw herself on the prison bunk in the city dungeon and cried in the midnight: ’93God have mercy’94? Do you really think God could hear her? Yes, just as easily as when fifteen years ago she was sick with scarlet fever, and her mother heard her when at midnight she asked for a drink of water. ’93He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?’94
When a soul prays, God does not sit upright until the prayer travels immensity and climbs to his ear. The Bible says he bends clear over. In more than one place Isaiah said he bowed down his ear. In more than one place the Psalmist said he inclined his ear, by which I come to believe that God puts his ear so closely down to your lips that he can hear your faintest whisper. It is not God away off up yonder; it is God away down here, close up’97so close up that when you pray to him it is not more a whisper than a kiss. Ah, yes! he hears the captive’92s sigh and the plash of the orphan’92s tear, and the dying syllables of the shipwrecked sailor driven on the Skerries, and the infant’92s ’93Now I lay me down to sleep,’94 as distinctly as he hears the fortissimo of brazen bands in the Dusseldorf festival, as easily as he hears the salvo of artillery when the thirteen squares of English troops open all their batteries at once at Waterloo. He that planted the ear can hear.
Just as sometimes an entrancing strain of music will linger in your ears for days after you have heard it, and just as a sharp cry of pain I once heard while passing through Bellevue Hospital clung to my ear for weeks, and just as a horrid blasphemy in the street sometimes haunts one’92s ears for days, so God hears’97not only hears, but holds’97the songs, the prayers, the groans, the worship, the blasphemy. The phonograph is a newly-invented instrument which holds not only the words you utter, but the very tones of your voice, so that a hundred years from now, that instrument turned, the very words you now utter and the very tone of your voice will be reproduced. Wonderful phonograph. As of our beloved dead we keep a lock of hair, or picture of the features, so the time will come when we will be able to keep the tones of their voices and the words they uttered. So that if now dear friends should speak into the phonograph some words of affection, and then they should be taken away from us, years from now from that instrument we could unroll the words they uttered and the very tones of their voice. But more wonderful is God’92s power to hold, to retain. Ah! what delightful encouragement for our prayers. What an awful reproof for our hard speeches. What assurance of warm-hearted sympathy for all our griefs. ’93He that planteth the ear, shall he not hear?’94
Better take that organ of your body away from all sin. Better put it under the best sound. Better take it away from all gossip, from all slander, from all innuendo, from all bad influence of evil association. Better put it to school, to church, to philharmonic. Better put that ear under the blessed touch of Christian hymnology. Better consecrate it for time and eternity to him who planted the ear. Rousseau, the infidel, fell asleep amid his sceptical manuscript lying all around the room, and in his dream he entered heaven and heard the song of the worshippers, and it was so sweet he asked an angel what it meant. The angel said: ’93This is the Paradise of God, and the song you hear is the anthem of the redeemed.’94 Under another roll of the celestial music Rousseau wakened and got up in the midnight and as well as he could wrote down the strains of the music that he had heard in the wonderful tune called the ’93Songs of the Redeemed.’94 God grant that it may not be to you and to me an infidel dream, but a glorious reality. When we come to the night of death and we lie down to our last sleep, may our ears really be wakened by the canticles of the heavenly temple, and the songs and the anthems and the carols and the doxologies that shall climb the musical ladder of that heavenly gamut.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage