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Page 60
So we advertise and concertize and have silver vases and costly
flowers and conventional ecclesiastical furniture. But we still hold a
"small-and-early" in the vestibule before service and a "five o'clock"
in the chapel afterward. Sunday morning church is a this-world
function with a pietized gossip and a decorous sort of sociable with
an intellectual fillip thrown in. Thus we try to make our services
attractive to the secular instincts, the non-religious things, in
man's nature. We try to get him into the church by saying, "You will
find here what you find elsewhere." It's rather illogical. The church
stands for something different. We say, "You will like to come and be
one of us because we are not different." The answer is, "I can get the
things of this world better in the world, where they belong, than with
you." Thus we have naturalized our very offices of devotion! Hence
the attempts to revive worship are incongruous and inconsistent. Hence
they have that sentimental and accidental character which is the
sign of the amateur. They do not bring us very near to the heavenly
country. It might be well to remember that the servant of Jahweh doth
not cry nor lift up his voice nor cause it to be heard in the streets.
Now, there are many reasons for this anomalous situation. One of them
is our inheritance of a deep-rooted Puritan distrust of a liturgical
service. That distrust is today a fetish and therefore much more
potent that it was when it was a reason. Puritanism was born in the
Reformation; it came out from the Roman church, where worship was
regarded as an end in itself. To Catholic believers worship is a
contribution to God, pleasing to Him apart from any effect it may have
on the worshiper. Such a theory of it is, of course, open to grave
abuse. Sometimes it led to indifference as to the effect of the
worship upon the moral character of the communicant, so that worship
could be used, not to conquer evil, but to make up for it, and thus
sin became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theory
of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made
hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the _hoc est corpus_ of the
mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer.
Here is a reason, once valid because moral, for our present situation.
Yet it must be confessed that again, as so often, we are doing what
the Germans call "throwing out the baby with the bath," namely,
repudiating a defect or the perversion of an excellence and, in so
doing, throwing away that excellence itself. It is clear that no
Protestant is ever tempted today to consider worship as its own reason
and its own end. We are, in a sense, utilitarian ritualists. Worship
to us is as valuable as it is valid because it is the chief avenue
of spiritual insight, a chief means of awakening penitence, obtaining
forgiveness, growing in grace and love. These are the ultimates; these
are pleasing to God.
A second reason, however, for our situation is not ethical and
essential, but economic and accidental. Our fathers' communities were
a slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancient
civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced
by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All their
life was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the
most elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worship
corresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think,
that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service
with its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society which
produced them elements both of high formality and conscious reverence
which they could not possibly offer to our luxurious, sophisticated
and wealthy age.
Is it not a dangerous thing to have brought an ever increasing
formality and recognition of a developed and sophisticated community
into our social and intellectual life but to have allowed our
religious expression to remain so anachronistic? Largely for social
and economic reasons we send most of our young men and young women
to college. There we deliberately cultivate in them the perception
of beauty, the sense of form, various expressions of the imaginative
life. But how much has our average non-liturgical service to offer
to their critically trained perceptions? Our church habits are pretty
largely the transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions of
middle-class family life. The relations in life which are precious
to such youth, the intimate, the mystical and subtle ones, get small
recognition or expression. A hundred agencies outside the church are
stimulating in the best boys and girls of the present generation fine
sensibilities, critical standards, the higher hungers. Our services,
chiefly instructive and didactic, informal and easy in character,
irritate them and make them feel like truculent or uncomfortable
misfits.
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