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Page 57
We should then begin with worship. A church which does not emphasize
it before everything else is trying to build the structure of a
spiritual society with the corner stone left out. Let us try,
first of all, to define it. An old and popular definition of the
descriptive sort says that "worship is the response of the soul to
the consciousness of being in the presence of God." A more modern
definition, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as "the
unification of consciousness around the central controlling idea of
God, the prevailing emotional tone being that of adoration." Evidently
we mean, then, by worship the appeal to the religious will through
feeling and the imagination. Worship is therefore essentially
creative. Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and there
a direct experience of God through high and concentrated emotion.
It fixes the attention upon Him as an object in Himself supremely
desirable. The result of this unified consciousness is peace and the
result of this peace and harmony is a new sense of power. Worship,
then, is the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one form
or another all religion strives by means of contemplation. So by its
very nature it belongs to the class of the absolutes.
Many psychologies of religion define this contemplation as aesthetic,
and make worship a higher form of delight. This appears to me a quite
typical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience. There
are four words which need explaining when we talk of worship. They
are: wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder springs from the
recognition of the limitations of our knowledge; it is an experience
of the mind. Admiration is the response of a growing intelligence to
beauty, partly an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience. These
distinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sentence "In
wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills
up the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance;
the last is the parent of adoration." Awe is the sense-perception
of the stupendous power and magnitude of the universe; it is, quite
literally, a godly fear. But it is not ignoble nor cringing, it
is just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, of a
comprehensive sanity.
Thus "I would love Thee, O God, if there were no heaven, _and if there
were no hell, I would fear Thee no less_." Reverence is devotion to
goodness, sense of awe-struck loyalty to a Being manifestly under the
influence of principles higher than our own.[41] Now it is with these
last two, awe and reverence, rather than wonder and admiration, that
worship has to do.
[Footnote 41: For a discussion of these four words see Allen,
_Reverence as the Heart of Christianity_, pp. 253 ff.]
Hence the essence of worship is not aesthetic contemplation. Without
doubt worship does gratify the aesthetic instinct and most properly
so. There is no normal expression of man's nature which has not its
accompanying delight. The higher and more inclusive the expression
the more exquisite, of course, the delight. But that pleasure is the
by-product, not the object, of worship. It itself springs partly from
the awe of the infinite and eternal majesty which induces the desire
to prostrate oneself before the Lord our Maker. "I have heard of Thee
by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I
abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." It also springs partly
from passionate devotion of a loyal will to a holy Being. "Behold, as
the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters and as the
eyes of a maid unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon
the Lord." Thus reverence is the high and awe-struck hunger for
spiritual communion. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?"
There is a noble illustration of the nature and the uses of worship
in the Journals of Jonathan Edwards, distinguished alumnus of Yale
College, and the greatest mind this hemisphere has produced. You
remember what he wrote in them, as a youth, about the young woman who
later became his wife: "They say there is a young lady in New Haven
who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and
that there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some way
or other invisible comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding
sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to
meditate on Him. Therefore if you present all the world before her,
with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for
it and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange
sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections, is most
just and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuade
her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the
world, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of wonderful
calmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this
great God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go
about from place to place singing sweetly and seems to be always full
of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone,
walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible
always conversing with her."
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