ther than us?
Because He calls us away from ourselves? back to home? Most of us
no longer know how to preach on that plane of experience or from the
point of view where such questions are serious and real. Our fathers
had a world view and a philosophy which made such preaching easy. But
their power did not lie in that world view; it lay in this vision of
Jesus which produced the view. Is not this the vision which we need?

CHAPTER SEVEN

WORSHIP AS THE CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE

Whatever becomes the inward and the invisible grace of the Christian
community such will be its outward and visible form. Those regulative
ideas and characteristic emotions which determine in any age the
quality of its religious experience will be certain to shape the
nature and conduct of its ecclesiastical assemblies. Their influence
will show, both in the liturgical and homiletical portions of public
worship. If anything further were needed, therefore, to indicate
the secularity of this age, its substitutes for worship and its
characteristic type of preaching would, in themselves, reveal the
situation. So we venture to devote these closing discussions to some
observations on the present state of Protestant public worship and the
prevailing type of Protestant preaching. For we may thus ascertain
how far those ideas and perceptions which an age like ours needs
are beginning to find an expression and what means may be taken to
increase their influence through church services in the community.

We begin, then, in this chapter, not with preaching, but with worship.
It seems to me clear that the chief office of the church is liturgical
rather than homiletical. Or, if that is too technical a statement,
it may be said that the church exists to set forth and foster the
religious life and that, because of the nature of that life, it finds
its chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative rather than the
rationalizing or practical areas of human expression. Even as Michael
Angelo, at the risk of his life, purloined dead bodies that he
might dissect them and learn anatomy, so all disciples of the art of
religion need the discipline of intellectual analysis and of knowledge
of the facts of the religious experience if they are to be leaders in
faith. There is a toughness of fiber needed in religious people that
can only come through such mental discipline. But anatomists are not
sculptors. Michael Angelo was the genius, the creative a