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Page 59
I think one may see, then, why worship as distinct from preaching,
or the hearing of preaching, is the first necessity of the religious
life. It unites us as nothing else can do with God the whole and God
the transcendent. The conception of God is the sum total of human
needs and desires harmonized, unified, concretely expressed. It is the
faith of the worshiper that this concept is derived from a real and
objective Being in some way corresponding to it. No one can measure
the influence of such an idea when it dominates the consciousness of
any given period. It can create and set going new desires and habits,
it can minish and repress old ones, because this idea carries, with
its transcendent conception, the dynamic quality which belongs to
the idea of perfect power. But this transcendent conception, being
essentially of something beyond, without and above ourselves can only
be "realized" through the feeling and the imagination, whose province
it is to deal with the supersensuous values, with the fringes of
understanding, with the farthest bounds of knowledge. These make the
springboard, so to speak, from which man dares to launch himself into
that sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor measure,
but which nevertheless we may perceive and feel, which in some sense
we know to be there.
So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely beginning at the
beginning and starting at the bottom. And, in the light of this
observation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churches
today and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is not
too much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant
communities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in the
nature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They have a na�vet�,
an incongruity, that can only be explained on the assumption of their
impoverished background.
This situation shows first in the heterogeneous character of our
experiments. We are continually printing on our churches' calendars
what we usually call "programs," but which are meant to be orders
of worship. We are also forever changing them. There is nothing
inevitable about their order; they have no intelligible,
self-verifying procedure. Anthems are inserted here and there without
any sense of the progression or of the psychology of worship. Glorias
are sung sometimes with the congregation standing up and sometimes
while they are sitting down. There is no lectionary to determine a
comprehensive and orderly reading of Scripture, not much sequence of
thought or progress of devotion either in the read or the extempore
prayers. There is no uniformity of posture. There are two historic
attitudes of reverence when men are addressing the Almighty. They are
the standing upon one's feet or the falling upon one's knees. For
the most part we neither stand nor kneel; we usually loll. Some of us
compromise by bending forward to the limiting of our breath and the
discomfort of our digestion. It is too little inducive to physical
ease or perhaps too derogatory to our dignity to kneel before the Lord
our Maker. All this seems too much like the efforts of those who have
forgotten what worship really is and are trying to find for it some
comfortable or attractive substitute.
Second: we show our inexperience by betraying the confusion
of aesthetic and ethical values as we strive for variety and
entertainment in church services; we build them around wonder and
admiration, not around reverence and awe. But we are mistaken if
we suppose that men chiefly desire to be pleasantly entertained or
extraordinarily delighted when they go into a church. They go there
because they desire to enter a Holy Presence; they want to approach
One before whom they can be still and know that He is God. All
"enrichments" of a service injected into it here and there, designed
to make it more attractive, to add color and variety, to arrest
the attention of the senses are, as ends, beside the point, and our
dependence upon them indicates the unhappy state of worship in our
day. That we do thus make our professional music an end in itself is
evident from our blatant way of advertising it. In the same way we
advertise sermon themes, usually intended to startle the pious and
provoke the ungodly. We want to arouse curiosity, social or political
interest, to achieve some secular reaction. We don't advertise that
tomorrow in our church there is to be a public worship of God, and
that everything that we are going to do will be in the awe-struck
sense that He is there. We are afraid that nobody would come if we
merely did that!
What infidels we are! Why are we surprised that the world is passing
us by? We say and we sing a great many things which it is incredible
to suppose we would address to God if we really thought He were
present. Yet anthems and congregational singing are either a sacrifice
solemnly and joyously offered to God or else all the singing is less,
and worse, than nothing in a church service. But how often sentimental
and restless music, making not for restraint and reverence, not
for the subduing of mind and heart but for the expression of those
expansive and egotistical moods which are of the essence of romantic
singing, is what we employ. There is a great deal of truly religious
music, austere in tone, breathing restraint and reverence, quietly
written. The anthems of Palestrina, Anerio, Viadana, Vittoria among
the Italians; of Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart among the Germans; and
of Tallis, Gibbons and Purcell among the English, are all of the truly
devout order. Yet how seldom are the works of such men heard in our
churches, even where they employ professional singers at substantial
salaries. We are everywhere now trying to give our churches splendid
and impressive physical accessories, making the architecture more and
more stately and the pews more and more comfortable! Thus we attempt
an amalgam of a mediaeval house of worship with an American domestic
interior, adoring God at our ease, worshiping Him in armchairs,
offering prostration of the spirit, so far as it can be achieved along
with indolence of the body.
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