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Page 56
We begin, then, in this chapter, not with preaching, but with worship.
It seems to me clear that the chief office of the church is liturgical
rather than homiletical. Or, if that is too technical a statement,
it may be said that the church exists to set forth and foster the
religious life and that, because of the nature of that life, it finds
its chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative rather than the
rationalizing or practical areas of human expression. Even as Michael
Angelo, at the risk of his life, purloined dead bodies that he
might dissect them and learn anatomy, so all disciples of the art of
religion need the discipline of intellectual analysis and of knowledge
of the facts of the religious experience if they are to be leaders in
faith. There is a toughness of fiber needed in religious people that
can only come through such mental discipline. But anatomists are not
sculptors. Michael Angelo was the genius, the creative artist, not
because he understood anatomy, but chiefly because of those as yet
indefinable and secret processes of feeling and intuition in man,
which made him feel rather than understand the pity and the terror,
the majesty and the pathos of the human spirit and reveal them in
significant and expressive line. Knowledge supported rather than
rivaled insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need religious
instruction. Nevertheless they are what they are because they are
first perceptive rather than reasoning beings. They both owe, the one
his salvation, the other his despair, to the fact that they have seen
the vision of the holy universe. Both are seers; the saint has given
his allegiance to the heavenly vision. The sinner has resolved to be
disobedient unto it. Both find their first and more natural approach
to religious truth, therefore, through the creative rather than the
critical processes, the emotional rather than the informative powers.
There are, of course, many in our churches who would dissent from
this opinion. It is characteristic of Protestantism, as of humanism in
general, that it lays its chief emphasis upon the intelligence. If we
go to church to practice the presence of God, must we not first know
who and what this God is whose presence with us we are there asked
to realize? So most Protestant services are more informative than
inspirational. Their attendants are assembled to hear about God rather
to taste and see that the Lord is good. They analyze the religious
experience rather than enjoy it; insensibly they come to regard
the spiritual life as a proposition to be proved, not a power to
be appropriated. Hence our services generally consist of some
"preliminary exercises," as we ourselves call them, leading up to the
climax--when it is a climax--of the sermon.
Here is a major cause for the declension of the influence of
Protestant church services. They go too much on the assumption that
men already possess religion and that they come to church to discuss
it rather than to have it provided. They call men to be listeners
rather than participants in their temples. Of course, one may find
God through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician or the
astronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think the thoughts of God
after him!" Yet a service which places its chief emphasis upon the
appeal to the will through instruction has declined from that realm
of the absolutes where religion in its purest form belongs. For since
preaching makes its appeal chiefly through reason, it thereby attempts
to produce only a partial and relative experience in the life of the
listener. It impinges upon the will by a slow process. Sometimes one
gets so deadly weary of preaching because, in a world like ours, the
reasonable process is so unreasonable. That's a half truth, of course,
but one that the modern world needs to learn.
Others would dissent from our position by saying that service, the
life of good will, is a sufficient worship. The highest adoration is
to visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction. _Laborare
est orare_. What we do speaks so loud God does not care for what
we say. True: but the value of what we do for God depends upon the
godliness of the doer and where shall he find that godliness save in
the secret place of the Most High? And the greatest gift we can give
our fellows is to bring them into the divine presence. "There is,"
says Dr. William Adams Brown, "a service that is directed to the
satisfaction of needs already in existence, and there is a service
that is itself the creator of new needs which enlarge the capacity of
the man to whom it would minister. To this larger service religion
is committed, and the measure of a man's fitness to render it is his
capacity for worship." But no one can give more than he has. If we are
to offer such gifts we must ourselves go before and lead. To create
the atmosphere in which the things of righteousness and holiness
seem to be naturally exalted above the physical, the commercial, the
domestic affairs of men; to lift the level of thought and feeling
to that high place where the spiritual consciousness contributes its
insights and finds a magnanimous utterance--is there anything that our
world needs more? There are noble and necessary ministries to the body
and the mind, but most needed, and least often offered, there is a
ministry to the human spirit. This is the gift which the worshiper can
bring. Knowledge of God may not be merely or even chiefly comprehended
in a concept of the intelligence; knowledge of Him is that vitalizing
consciousness of the Presence felt in the heart, which opens our eyes
that we may see that the mountain is full of horses and chariots of
fire round about us and that they who fight with us are more than
they who fight with them. This is the true and central knowledge that
private devotion and public worship alone can give; preaching can
but conserve and transmit this religious experience through the mind,
worship creates it in the heart. Edwards understood that neither
thought nor conduct can take its place. "The sober performance of
moral duty," said he, "is no substitute for passionate devotion to a
Being with its occasional moments of joy and exaltation."
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