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Page 62
One of them is by paying intelligent attention to the physical
surroundings of the worshiper. The assembly room for worship obviously
should not be used for other purposes; all its suggestions and
associations should be of one sort and that sort the highest. Quite
aside from the question of taste, it is psychologically indefensible
to use the same building, and especially the same room in the
building, for concerts, for picture shows, for worship. Here we at
once create a distracted consciousness; we dissipate attention; we
deliberately make it harder for men and women to focus upon one, and
that the most difficult, if the most precious, mood.
For the same reason, the physical form of the room should be one
that does not suggest either the concert hall or the playhouse, but
suggests rather a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition. Until
the cinema was introduced into worship, we were vastly improving in
these respects, but now we are turning the morning temple into an
evening showhouse. I think we evince a most impertinent familiarity
with the house of God! And too often the church is planned so that
it has no privacies or recesses, but a hideous publicity pervades its
every part. We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patterns
which we see in hotel lobbies and clubs; we hang up maps behind the
reading desk; we clutter up its platform with grand pianos.
It is a mere matter of good taste and good psychology to begin our
preparation for a ministry of worship by changing all this. There
should be nothing in color or ornament which arouses the restless mood
or distracts the eye. Severe and simple walls, restrained and devout
figures in glass windows, are only to be tolerated. Descriptive
windows, attempting in a most untractable medium a sort of na�ve
realism, are equally an aesthetic and an ecclesiastical offense.
Figures of saints or great religious personages should be typical,
impersonal, symbolic, not too much like this world and the things of
it. There is a whole school of modern window glass distinguished by
its opulence and its realism. It ought to be banished from houses of
worship. Since it is the object of worship to fix the attention upon
one thing and that thing the highest, the room where worship is held
should have its own central object. It may be the Bible, idealized as
the word of God; it may be the altar on which stands the Cross of the
eternal sacrifice. But no church ought to be without one fixed point
to which the eye of the body is insensibly drawn, thereby making it
easier to follow it with the attention of the mind and the wishes of
the heart. At the best, our Protestant ecclesiastical buildings are
all empty! There are meeting-houses, not temples assembly rooms,
not shrines. There is apparently no sense in which we are willing
to acknowledge that the Presence is on their altar. But at least the
attention of the worshiper within them may focus around some symbol of
that Presence, may be fixed on some outward sign which will help the
inward grace.
But second: our chief concern naturally must be with the content of
the service of worship itself, not with its physical surroundings. And
here then are two things which may be said. First, any formal order of
worship should be historic; it should have its roots deep in the past;
whatever else is true of a service of worship it ought not to suggest
that it has been uncoupled from the rest of time and allowed to run
wild. Now, this means that an order of worship, basing itself on the
devotion of the ages, will use to some extent their forms. I do not
see how anyone would wish to undertake to lead the same company of
people week by week in divine worship without availing himself of the
help of written prayers, great litanies, to strengthen and complement
the spontaneous offices of devotion. There is something almost
incredible to me in the assumption that one man can, supposedly
unaided, lead a congregation in the emotional expression of its
deepest life and desires without any assistance from the great
sacramentaries and liturgies of the past. Christian literature is rich
with a great body of collects, thanksgivings, confessions, various
special petitions, which gather up the love and tears, the vision
and the anguish of many generations. These, with their phrases made
unspeakably precious with immemorial association, with their subtle
fitting of phrase to insight, of expression to need, born of long
centuries of experiment and aspiration, can do for a congregation what
no man alone can ever hope to accomplish. The well of human needs and
desires is so deep that, without these aids, we have not much to draw
with, no plummet wherewith to sound its dark and hidden depths.
I doubt if we can overestimate the importance of giving this sense of
continuity in petitions, of linking up the prayer of the moment and
the worship of the day with the whole ageless process so that it seems
a part of that volume of human life forever ascending unto the eternal
spirit, just as the gray plume of smoke from the sacrifice ever curled
upward morning by morning and night by night from the altar of the
temple under the blue Syrian sky. We cannot easily give this sense of
continuity, this prestige of antiquity, this resting back on a great
body of experience, unless we know and use the language and the
phrases of our fathers. It is to the God who hath been our dwelling
place in all generations, that we pray; to Him who in days of old
was a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night to His faithful
children; to the One who is the Ancient of Days, Infinite Watcher of
the sons of men. Only by acquaintance with the phrases, the petitions
of the past, and only by a liberal use of them can we give background
and dignity, or anything approaching variety and completeness, to our
own public expression and interpretation of the devotional life. If
anyone objects to this use of formal prayers on the ground of their
formality, let him remember that we, too, are formal, only we, alas,
have made a cult of formlessness. It would surprise the average
minister to know the well-worn road which his supposedly spontaneous
and extempore devotions follow. Phrase after phrase following in the
same order of ideas, and with the same pitiably limited vocabulary,
appear week by week in them. How much better to enrich this painfully
individualistic formalism with something of the corporate glories of
the whole body of Christian believers.
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