THERE are those who in religious matters, as well as in all other
departments of life, are content to walk unquestioningly the path which
the footsteps of previous generations have made easy and familiar. But
there are others and these among the more thoughtful and earnest minds
to whom it is not enough to utter earnest words concerning enthusiasm
and devotion, consecration and worship. These spiritual attitudes and
exercises must first be made to appear reasonable to them, fitting,
fitting to their conception of God, fitting to their ideas of that
which is highest and finest in man.
So there are many things that pass to-day as forms of worship, many
ideas connected with worship, which this class of minds cannot heartily
and fully accept. Some of them do not seem to them fitting, as they
look upward towards God. They cannot, for example, believe that God
cares for flattery, cares to sit on his throne, and be told by his
creatures how great and how wonderful he is. They cannot think that he
cares to have presents brought to him, gifts offered on his altar, as
men say. They cannot believe that he really is anxious for many of
these external forms and ceremonies, which seem to the onlooker to
constitute the essential element of much that passes as popular
worship.
And then, on the other hand, man has grown into a sense of dignity. He
has a higher and loftier idea of his own nature and of what is fitting
to a man; and he cannot any longer heartily enter into the meaning of
words which speak of him as a worm of the dust, which seem to him to
intimate that God cares to have him prostrate himself in utter
humiliation, to speak of himself always as a miserable sinner, as one
without any good in him.
Many of these things from the point of view of the man himself no
longer constitute the real conviction, the real feeling of the noblest
hearts; and so there are many who are troubled over this question of
worship, who are not quite sure as to how much spiritual significance
it may any longer retain, not quite sure as to how vital a part it may
play in the development of the religious life of man.
We find an adequate and perfectly natural explanation of some of these
phases of worship that trouble us to-day, as we look back and note some
of the steps in the religious development of the race. I shall not
raise the question as to how or where or in what way the act of human
worship began. I will simply say that one of the first manifestations
of that which came to be religious worship which we are able to trace
at the present time is to be found in the burial-mounds of the dead.
Men reverenced the memory of the chief of the tribe who had passed into
the invisible. They did not believe that he had ceased to exist: they
rather looked upon him as having become, because invisible, a higher
ruler. They thought of him as still interested in the welfare of the
tribe, still its guardian, still its avenger, still demanding of the
tribe the same reverence that it paid to him while he was yet alive;
and his followers clothed him with all the human attributes with which
they were familiar during the time he was among them. He was still
hungry, he was still thirsty, he still wanted his old-time weapons, all
those things he was familiar with during his earthly career. And so
they brought food, and laid it on the burial-mound above his body; and
they poured out their libations of drink to quench his spiritual
thirst.
These were very real beliefs on the part of man universally during a
certain stage of his mental, his moral, his spiritual growth. It was a
very natural step beyond this to the origin of sacrifices. All
sacrifice began right here. It was a religious meal, in which God and
his worshippers equally shared. Some animal, supposed to partake of a
life similar to that which distinguished the god and the worshipper,
too, is sacrificed. It is cooked, and the worshippers partake of the
meal; and they fully believe that the god joins in it also. And then
the drink they partake of, and pour out their libation for the
invisible spirit.
So the first sacrifice was a meal eaten together; and just as, for
example, to-day you see a remnant of this idea when a man eats with an
Arab, although the Arab may discover five minutes after that it was his
bitterest foe, he finds himself at least during a little time bound to
amity and peace by the fact that they have shared this sacred meal
together, so in the act of sacrifice it was believed that the
worshipper consecrated himself in loyalty to his God, and that the God
consecrated himself in faithfulness to his worshippers as their
guardian and protector. Here is given the central significance of
sacrifices that have made so large a part of the religious ceremonial
of the world.
These are not peculiar to what we call pagan people. Do you remember
the story of how, after the flood, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God up
in heaven is represented as smelling the flavor of the burning meat and
as rejoicing in it, accepting the offering, and pledging himself to
guard and care for his worshippers? Do you remember, also, that story
of Jacob, how, when he is on his journey, he falls asleep, and has his
wonderful dream, and sees the ladder starting at his feet and ending at
the throne of God, up and down which the angels are passing? When he
wakes in the morning, he says, "Surely, this is holy ground"; and he
takes the stone on which he slept, and sets it up as an altar, and
pours out the sacred oil as an offering to his God.
All the way through the Old Testament, in the history of the Hebrew
people, you trace these same ideas that you find in the life of almost
all the other nations of the world. It was only a step beyond this to
the idea of presenting gifts to God, no matter what the nature of that
gift might be. And, as men came to make him these sacred offerings,
they came also to believe and in the most natural way in the world
that, the more costly the gift, the more likely it was to be accepted
on the part of its sublime recipient.
So human sacrifices arose; for there could be no more sacred gift than
for a man to offer his own child or his own wife to God. The gods were
looked upon as sometimes demanding these tremendous sacrifices as the
conditions of their mercy or their care. I refer you for illustration
to one of the most striking and touching of Tennyson's poems. I think
it is entitled "The Victim." There had been famine in the land, and the
priests have announced that they have learned that the gods demand as
an offering that which is most sacred and most dear to the heart of the
king; and the question is as to whether it is his son, his boy, or his
wife. They think it must be the boy, because he was the one that would
continue the kingly line; but the wife detects the gladness of her
husband when he sees that the boy is to be selected, and knows by that
sense of relief that passes over his face that the priests have made a
mistake, and that she herself is to be the victim. And so, in her love
for him and for the people, she rushes upon the sacrificial knife.
All these ideas, you see, are perfectly natural in certain stages of
human development, logically reasoned out in view of their thought of
the gods and of their relations to them and of what these gods must
desire at their hands. It is not only among the very early beliefs that
you find these ideas controlling the thought and action of men. Study
the ancient classical times as they are reflected in the Iliad, in the
Odyssey, or in Virgil's Aeneid, and you will find that the gods were
very human in all their feelings, their thoughts, their passions. As,
in the Old Testament, Yahweh is reported to have been a jealous God,
not willing that respect should be paid to anybody but himself, so you
find the old Greek and Roman deities very jealous as to what were
regarded as their rights, as to what the people must pay to them; and,
if they are angry, they can be appeased if an offering rare and costly
enough be brought by the worshipper. You can buy their favor; you can
ward off their anger, if only you can offer them something which is
precious enough so that they are ready to accept it at the worshipper's
hands.
These are not merely Old Testament ideas, nor only pagan ideas. Some
years ago, when I was in Rome, I visited among others one of the many
churches dedicated to Mary under one name or another; and there was a
statue of the Virgin by the altar, and it impressed me very much to see
that it was loaded down with gifts. Every place on the statue itself to
which anything could be attached, anything on the altar around it, was
weighted down with gold chains, with jewels, with precious gifts of
every kind. These had been brought as thank-offerings, expressions of
worship, or pledges connected with a petition, because I have brought
thee this gift, have mercy, do this for me which I need.
So these old ideas are vital still, and live on in the modern world.
And yet modern and magnificent are those utterances of the old Hebrew
prophet, who had so completely outgrown the common customs even of his
time, when he represents God as saying that he is weary of all these
external offerings. He says: I do not want the cattle brought to my
temples. Those that wander on a thousand hills are already mine. If I
were hungry, I would not ask thee. He does not want the rivers of oil
poured out. What does he want? The old prophet says, What doth the Lord
require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with God? And some of the later writers caught a glimpse of the same
spiritual truth when they said, Not burnt- offerings, not calves of a
year old; when they cry out, Shall I bring the fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul? No, it is a broken and contrite heart, a heart sorry
for its sin, a heart consecrating itself to righteousness and truth,
this inner, spiritual worship.
The prophets, you see, were climbing up to that magnificent ideal so
finely set up by Jesus as reported in the Gospel from which I read our
lesson this morning. They had not only believed that God was to be
worshipped after these external fashions, but that there was some
special place, not only where it was easier to think of him, but where
he demanded the offering should be brought. He said to the woman at the
well: You think it is Mount Gerizim where the people ought to worship,
and the Jews think it is Mount Moriah; but I say unto you that neither
in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. God
is spirit, the universal spirit, every place a temple, every spot
hallowed, if only those that worship him do so in spirit and in truth.
You see, then, how up these stairways of gradual approach the human
race, in the person of its highest and finest representatives, has
climbed, how near it has come to the spiritual ideal of God and the
spiritual thought of that which he requires at our hands.
Is worship, then, so far as external form is concerned, to pass away?
By no manner of means, as I think. As you analyze any one of these old
primitive acts of worship, no matter how crude, no matter how cruel,
how bloody, how repulsive it may be to-day from the outlook of our
higher civilization, you will note that it has in it an element which,
I believe, is permanent, and can never be outgrown. Whatever else there
is, there is always the sense of a Presence, Invisible, mighty, high,
and, from the point of view of the worshipper, holy and set apart.
There is always the feeling of being in the shadow of the high and
lofty One who inhabiteth eternity. There is always the sense of
uplooking, of worship, in the higher sense of that term. Always, at any
rate, the germ of these; and this, it seems to me, we may be sure and
certain, however it may clothe itself in the future, shall never pass
away.
I wish now, if there are any who think it is not befitting the
greatness, the nobleness of man that he should bow himself in the
presence of the highest, humiliate himself, if you choose to use that
term, in acts of worship, I wish now, I say, to consider worship under
two or three aspects, and see what it means. And, in the first place, I
ask you to note that the ability to worship is always the measure of
the rank of a being, it is the test and the standard of greatness.
As you look over the animal world, which one of them are we accustomed
to think of as coming the nearest to man? What one do we love to have
most with us, to associate most with our joys, with the peace of our
homes? Is it not the dog? And as you examine the dog, study carefully
his nature and characteristics, do you not note that there is in his
nature a hint, a suggestion, of that which is the root of all worship?
The dog is the one animal with which man is accustomed familiarly to
associate himself, who looks up with an incipient reverence, love,
almost worship, to his master. And it is this quality in the dog that
enables him to look up, and, however dimly, feel the life of some one
that is above him, that lifts him into our society, and makes us feel
this tenderness of heart-kinship with that which is finest in his
nature.
And man is man simply because he is able to look above himself. The old
Greeks had an anticipation of that idea when they called man anthropos;
for the meaning of the word is the upward-looker. As in imagination you
go back and down to the time when man first appeared, developed from
the lower life which preceded him, the first thing you can think about
him as human is the opening of his eyes in wonder, the lifting of his
face in curiosity and question, and the birth of adoration in his soul.
This is that which made him man.
You go and study the lowest type of barbaric life to-day; and you will
find that the barbarian has very little curiosity as compared with the
civilized man. You will find that it is very difficult to astonish him
with anything. He does not wonder. He takes everything for granted. He
does not see clearly and deeply enough to appreciate the marvel. Let me
illustrate from a specimen of barbaric life itself. A few years ago the
chief of an Indian tribe was brought from the plains of the West to
visit Washington. The idea was to impress him as much as possible with
the idea of our civilization, so that he might report it to his people
when he went home. After they had crossed the Mississippi on their way
to the West, the gentleman in whose care he was travelling asked the
chief what the one thing which he had seen during his trip was which
had impressed him the most; and he said at once the St. Louis bridge.
But his companion said, Are you not astonished at the Capitol of
Washington? "Yes," he said, "but my people can pile stones on top of
each other; but they cannot make a cobweb of steel hang in the air."
You see how that perception lifted him above the average level of his
people? He was showing his capacity for higher and nobler civilization.
It is just this ability in the man to wonder, to see something to
wonder at, to worship, to admire, which lifts him one grade higher than
that of the average level of his tribe. So that which makes man a man
is the capacity in him to admire. All admiration is the essence, the
root, of worship. And, the more things a man admires, the greater and
nobler type of man he is seen to be. If he can admire music, if he can
admire painting, if he can admire sculpture, if he can admire poetry,
if he can admire literature of every kind, if he can admire grand
architecture, the beautiful monuments of the world, we say, Here is a
large, all-round type of man. We estimate his dignity, his greatness,
by the capacity that he shows for worship in its lower type; for
worship is simply looking up with admiration.
There is another quality about this worship that I wish to speak of. It
is the power that is capable of transforming a man, making him over
into the likeness of that which he admires. You find the man without
this capacity, and you know it is hopeless to appeal to him, hopeless
to set up ideals, hopeless to place before him enticing examples. There
is nothing in him to which these things appeal. Take Alexander the
Great. It is said he carried around with him a copy of the Iliad, and
that Achilles was his ideal of a hero. Do you not see how this
admiration transformed the life of the young king, and made him after
the type of that which he admired? It does not make any difference what
this special admiration may be. Let a man admire Beethoven, and he will
cultivate instinctively the qualities that make the beauty and
greatness of Beethoven's character and the wonders of his career.
This ideal may be in a book, it may be embodied in fiction. I have
liked always, either on the walls of my room or on the walls of my
heart, to have certain portraits of persons whom I have loved, who are
no longer living; and they are to me constant stimulus. They speak to
me by day, and in my dreams at night their eyes follow me, and seem to
look into my soul; and in their presence I could not do a mean, an
unmanly thing. I love, I reverence, I worship these lofty ideals. And
the quality of these characters filters down through and permeates the
thought and the life.
You remember how the other aspect of this thought is illustrated by
Shakspere. He says, "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the
dyer's hand." If that with which you keep company, that you admire, is
below you, it degrades; if it is above you, it lifts. In any case you
are transformed, shaped into the likeness of that which you admire.
There is another aspect of this close akin to that which I have just
been dealing with. It is only the worshipper who has in him any
promise, any possibility, of growth. Whether it is the individual or
the nation, it makes no difference. If you find no capacity to admire
that which is above and beyond you, then there is no hope of progress.
Take the young man who thinks he has exhausted the possibilities of the
world, who has reached the stage, who prides himself on not being
surprised, not being over whelmed, not admiring anything. The careful
outside observer knows that, instead of having exhausted the
possibilities and greatness and wonders of the universe, he has simply
exhausted himself.
The man who knows how full the world is of that which is beautiful and
great and true and noble walks through the universe with his head bared
and bowed, and feels, as did Moses when standing in the presence of the
burning bush, that he ought to take off his shoes from his feet, for
the place where he is standing is holy ground. Wherever you are
standing in this universe, which is full of God from star to dust
particle, is holy ground; and, if you do not feel it, if you are not
touched, if you are not bowed, if you are not thrilled with wonder, it
is defect in you, and not lack of God.
If the musician admires his great predecessors and strives to emulate
them; if the painter in the presence of the Sistine Madonna feels
lifted and touched, so that he never can be content with poor work
again; if the sculptor is ready to bend his knees in the presence of
the Venus of Melos, as he sees her standing at the end of the long
gallery in the Louvre; if the lover of his kind admires John Howard,
and can never be content unless he is doing something for his fellow-
men again; if we can be touched by lives like Clara Barton's, like
Florence Nightingale's, like Dorothea Dix's, like the great and
consecrated ones of the earth; if in any department of life we can be
lifted, humbled, thrilled, at the same time with the thought of the
greatness and glory and beauty that are above and beyond us, then there
is hope of growth, then there is life that can come to something fine
and noble in the future.
I wish, in the light of these illustrations of what worship means, to
note the thought that a great many men conscientious, earnest, simple
who have never been accustomed to think of themselves as religious, and
perhaps would deny it if a friend suggested to them that they had in
them the possibilities of worship, that perhaps they are worshippers,
even if they know it not. A great many persons have thrown away the
common ideals of worship, and perhaps have settled down to the idea
that they are not worshippers at all, while all the time the substance
and the beauty and the glory of worship are in their daily lives and
always in their hearts. I want to suggest two or three grades of
worship, to show that this worship climbs; and I want to call attention
to the fact that on the lowest grade it is worship of God just the same
as on the highest, that all worship or admiration for truth, for
beauty, for good, wherever, however, manifested, is really worship of
God, whether we think of it or call it by that name or not, because
they all are manifestations of God.
Take the man who is touched and lifted by natural beauty, the sense of
natural power; the man who loves the woods, who turns and stands to see
the glory of a sunset, who is lifted by tides of emotion as he hears
the surf beat on the shore, who feels bowed in the presence of the wide
night sky of stars, who is humbled at the same time that he is uplifted
in the presence of the mountains, who is touched by all natural scenes
of beauty and peace and glory. Are not these men in their degree
worshippers?
Take the feeling that is expressed in those beautiful lines of Byron.
We do not think of Byron as a religious nature, but certainly he had in
him the heart of worship when he could write such thoughts as these:
"'Tis midnight.
On the mountains brown
The cold, round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters; blue the sky
Seems like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright.
Whoever looked upon them shining
And turned to earth without repining,
Nor wished for wings to flee away
And mix with their eternal ray?"
And Wordsworth says he feels a Presence that "Disturbs him with the joy
of elevated thought, A sense sublime of something far more deeply
interfused."
And so you may run all through the poets, these simply as hints,
specimens, every one of them worshippers, touched by the beauty, glory,
uplift of the natural world.
And then pass to the next stage, and come to the worship of the human,
to the admiration of the highest and finest qualities that are
manifested in the lives of men and women. Who is there that is not
touched and thrilled by some story of heroic action, of heroic self-
sacrifice, of consecration to duty in the face of danger and death? And
no matter what this manifestation of human goodness may be, if you can
be thrilled by it and lifted by it, then you have taken another step up
this ladder of worship which leads you into the very presence chamber
of the Divine.
Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for
knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration
to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme
contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or
low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the
faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the
fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his
character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.
So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its
consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its
superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in
the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We
are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of
Jesus, as he illumines and beautifies his life, as he makes glorious
the humble pathways of Galilee, and so casts a reflected glory over the
humblest pathways any of us may be called upon to tread.
The next step in our ascent brings us to the conscious worship of God
himself. We cannot grasp the divine idea. The finite cannot measure or
outline the infinite; and so, when we say God, we mean only the
grandest ideal that we can frame, that reaches on towards, but can
never adequately express the Deity. And so we worship this thought,
this ideal, growing as our capacity develops, advancing as the race
advances, and ever leading us Godward, as when we follow a ray of light
we are travelling towards its source. And the attitude of our souls in
the presence of this which is divine is truest worship. The humility of
it, the exaltation of it, is beautifully phrased in two or three lines
which I wish to repeat to you from Browning's Saul: "I but open my
eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined,
full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the
flesh, in the soul and the clod. And, thus looking within and around
me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises
it, too), As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet!"
Here is the significance of the thought I had in mind at the opening.
We talk about humbling ourselves. When we can bend with reverence in
the presence of that which is above us, the very bending is exaltation;
for it indicates the capacity to appreciate, to admire, to adore. Thus
we climb up into the ability to worship God, the infinite Spirit, our
Father, in spirit and in truth.
Now to raise one moment the question suggested near the opening, Are
forms of worship to pass away? The reply to this seems to me perfectly
clear. Those forms which sprang out of and are fitted to only lower
ideals of worship, ideals which humanity outgrows, these must be left
behind, or else they must be transformed, and filled with a new and
higher meaning. But forms will always remain. But note one thing: they
sometimes say that we Unitarians are too cold, and do not have form
enough. You will see that, the higher men rise intellectually, the less
there is always of outward expression.
For example, before men were able to speak with any large vocabulary,
they eked out their meaning by all kinds of motions and gestures. But
the most highly cultivated men to- day, in their conversation, are the
ones who get the least excited and have the least recourse to gestures,
because they are capable of expressing the highest, finest, and most
varied thoughts by the elaborate power of speech which they have
developed. And perhaps the highest and finest worship of the world will
not be that which has the most elaborate ceremonial and ritual; but it
will have adequate and fitting ceremonial and ritual, because it will
naturally seek to express in some external way that which it feels.
I sometimes wish and perhaps you will pardon me for saying it here and
now that we Unitarians were a little less afraid of adequate posture
and gesture in our acts of public worship. God is, indeed, everywhere
as much as he is here; but this is the place we have specially
consecrated to thinking about him and to going through our stated forms
of worship. And if, when you enter the house of a friend, you take off
your hat, you bow the head, it seems to me it would be especially
fitting to do it, when one enters a Christian church. And, in the
attitude of prayer, I wish that all might find it in their hearts to
sit with bended brow and closed eyes as in the presence of the Supreme,
shutting out the common, the outside world, and trying to realize what
it means to come consciously to the feet of the eternal One.
I love these simple, fitting, external manifestations of the worshipful
spirit; and, if we do not substitute them for the worship, and think we
worship when we bend the knee, this appropriate expression of the
spirit, or feeling, it seems to ought to help cultivate the feeling and
the spirit, and make it easier for us to be conscious of the presence
of the Divine.
We are men, then, in the highest sense of the term, only as we are
worshippers. And the more worshipful we are, in high and true sense of
that word, the nobler and higher manhood, and the grander the
possibilities in us of de intellectual, moral, spiritual growth.
Let us, then, cultivate the admiring, the wondering, the worshipful
attitude of heart and mind, and recognize on lowest steps of this
ladder that lifts to God, the presence of the same divine power and
beauty and glory as that which we see clearly on the highest, and know
that always, when we are worshipping any manifestation of God, we are
shipping Him who is spirit, in spirit and in truth.
When on some strain of music Our thoughts are wafted high; When,
touched with tender pity, Kind teardrops dim the eye; When thrilled
with scenes of grandeur, Or moved to deeds of love, Do we not give thee
worship, O God in heaven above? For Thou art all life's beauty, And
Thou art all its good: By Thy tides are we lifted To every lofty mood.
Whatever good is in us, Whatever good we see, And every high endeavor,
Are they not all from Thee?