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.
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.
A third reason for the lack of corporate or public offices of devotion
in our services lies in the intellectual character of the Protestant
centuries. We have seen how they have been centuries of individualism.
Character has been conceived of as largely a personal affair expressed
in personal relationships. The believer was like Christian in Bunyan's
_Pilgrim's Progress_. He started for the Heavenly Country because
he was determined to save his own soul. When he realized that he was
living in the City of Destruction it did not occur to him that, as
a good man, he must identify his fate with it. On the contrary, he
deserted wife and children with all possible expedition and got him
out and went along through the Slough of Despond, up to the narrow
gate, to start on the way of life. It was a chief glory of mediaeval
society that it was based upon corporate relationships. Its cathedrals
were possible because they were the common house of God for every
element of the community. Family and class and state were dominant
factors then. But we have seen how, in the Renaissance and the
Romantic Movement, individualism supplanted these values. Now,
Protestantism was contemporary with that new movement, indeed, a part
of it. Its growing egotism and the colossal egotism of the modern
world form a prime cause for the impoverishment of worship in
Protestant churches.
And so this brings us, then, to the real reason for our devotional
impotence, the one to which we referred in the opening sentences of
the chapter. It is essentially due to the character of the regulative
ideas of our age. It lies in that world view whose expressions in
literature, philosophy and social organizations we have been
reviewing in these pages. The partial notion of God which our age has
unconsciously made the substitute for a comprehensive understanding of
Him is essentially to blame. For since the contemporary doctrine is
of His immanence, it therefore follows that it is chiefly through
observation of the natural world and by interpretation of contemporary
events that men will approach Him if they come to Him at all.
Moreover, our humanism, in emphasizing the individual and exalting his
self-sufficiency, has so far made the mood of worship alien and the
need of it superfluous. The overemphasis upon preaching, the general
passion of this generation for talk and then more talk, and then
endless talk, is perfectly intelligible in view of the regulative
ideas of this generation. It seeks its understanding of the world
chiefly in terms of natural and tangible phenomena and chiefly by
means either of critical observation or of analytic reasoning. Hence
preaching, especially that sort which looks for the divine principle
in contemporary events, has been to the fore. But worship, which finds
the divine principle in something more and other than contemporary
events--which indeed does not look outward to "events" at all--has
been thrown into the background.
It seems to me clear, then, that if we are to emphasize the
transcendent elements in religion; if they represent, as we have been
contending, the central elements of the religious experience, its
creative factors, then the revival of worship will be a prime step
in creating a more truly spiritual society. I am convinced that a
homilizing church belongs to a secularizing age. One cannot forget
that the ultimate, I do not say the only, reason for the founding
of the non-liturgical churches was the rise of humanism. One
cannot fail to see the connection between humanistic doctrine and
moralistic preaching, or between the naturalism of the moment and
the mechanicalizing of the church. "The Christian congregation,"
said Luther, child of the humanistic movement, "should never assemble
except the word of God be preached." "In other countries," says old
Isaac Taylor, "the bell calls people to worship; in Scotland it
calls them to a preachment." And one remembers the justice of Charles
Kingsley's fling at the Dissenters that they were "creatures who
went to church to hear sermons!" It would seem evident, then, that a
renewal of worship would be the logical accompaniment of a return to
distinctly religious values in society and church.
What can we do, then, better for an age of paganism than to cultivate
this transcendent consciousness? Direct men away from God the
universal and impersonal to God the particular and intimate. Nothing
is more needed for our age than to insist upon the truth that there
are both common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; that
these are not contradictory; that they are complementary; that they
are not identical. It is the church's business to insist that men
must live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular,
in order to be able to surmount and endure the secular, the common and
the universal. It is her business to insist that through worship
all this can be accomplished. But can worship be taught? Is not the
devotee, like the poet or the lover or any other genius, born and
not made? Well, whether it can be taught or not, it at least can be
cultivated and developed, and there are three very practical ways in
which this cultivation can be brought about.
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 naïve
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.
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.