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Page 63
But, second: there should be also the principle of immediacy in the
service, room for the expression of individual needs and desires
and for reference to the immediate and local circumstances of the
believer. A church in which there is no spontaneous and extempore
prayer, which only harked backward to the past, might build the tombs
of the prophets but it might also stifle new voices for a new age.
But extempore prayer should not be impromptu prayer. It should have
coherence, dignity, progression. The spirit should have been humbly
and painstakingly prepared for it so that sincere and ardent feeling
may wing and vitalize its words. The great prayers of the ages, known
of all the worshipers, perhaps repeated by them all together, tie in
the individual soul to the great mass of humanity and it moves on,
with its fellows, toward salvation as majestically and steadily as
great rivers flow. The extempore and silent prayer, not unpremeditated
but still the unformed outpouring of the individual heart, gives each
man the consciousness of standing naked and alone before his God. Both
these, the corporate and the separate elements of worships are vital;
there should be a place for each in every true order of worship.
But, of course, the final thing to say is the first thing. Whatever
may be the means that worship employs, its purpose must be to make and
keep the church a place of repose, to induce constantly the life of
relinquishment to God, of reverence and meditation. And this it will
do as it seeks to draw men up to the "otherness," the majesty, the
aloofness, the transcendence of the Almighty. To this end I would use
whatever outward aids time and experience have shown will strengthen
and deepen the spiritual understanding. I should not fear to use
the cross, the sacraments, the kneeling posture, the great picture,
the carving, the recitation of prayers and hymns, not alone to
intensify this sense in the believer but equally to create it in the
non-believer. The external world moulds the internal, even as the
internal makes the external. If these things mean little in the
beginning, there is still truth in the assertion of the devotee that
if you practice them they will begin to mean something to you. This is
not merely that a meaning will be self-induced. It is more than that.
They will put us in the volitional attitude, the emotional mood, where
the meaning is able to penetrate. Just as all the world acknowledges
that there is an essential connection between good manners and good
morals, between military discipline and physical courage, so there
is a connection between a devotional service and the gifts of the
spiritual life. Such a service not merely strengthens belief in
the High and Holy One, it has a real office in creating, in making
possible, that belief itself.
We shall sum it all up if we say in one word that the offices of
devotion emphasize the cosmic character of religion. They take us out
of the world of moral theism into the world of a universal theism.
They draw us away from religion in action to religion in itself;
they give us, not the God of this world, but the God who is from
everlasting to everlasting, to whom a thousand years are but as
yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thus they help
us to make for ourselves an interior refuge into whose precincts
no eye may look, into whose life no other soul may venture. In that
refuge we can be still and know that He is God. There we can eat the
meat which the world knoweth not of, there have peace with Him. It
is in these central solitudes, induced by worship, that the vision
is clarified, the perspective corrected, the vital forces recharged.
Those who possess them are transmitters of such heavenly messages;
they issue from them as rivers pour from undiminished mountain
streams. Does the world's sin and pain and weakness come and empty
itself into the broad current of these devout lives? Then their
fearless onsweeping forces gather it all up, carry it on, cleanse and
purify it in the process. Over such lives the things of this world
have no power. They are kept secretly from them all in His pavilion
where there is no strife of tongues.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE
If one were to ask any sermon-taster of our generation what is the
prevailing type of discourse among the better-known preachers of the
day, he would probably answer, "The expository." Expository preaching
has had a notable revival in the last three decades, especially
among liberal preachers; that is, among those who like ourselves have
discarded scholastic theologies, turned to the ethical aspects of
religion for our chief interests and accepted the modern view of the
Bible. To be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preaching
which made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century famous. It
is not the detailed exposition of each word and clause, almost of each
comma, which marks the mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers,
an Alexander Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle. For that
assumed a verbally inspired and hence an inerrant Scripture; it dealt
with the literature of the Old and New Testaments as being divine
revelations. The new expository preaching proceeds from almost an
opposite point of view. It deals with this literature as being a
transcript of human experience. Its method is direct and simple and,
within sharp limits, very effective. The introduction to one of these
modern expository sermons would run about as follows:
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