s perception of the various steps in
the unification of the soul with the eternal Spirit through sublime
emotion.

"Grant, O God, that we may desire Thee, and desiring Thee, seek Thee,
and seeking Thee, find Thee, and finding Thee, be satisfied with Thee
forever."

I think one may see, then, why worship as distinct from preaching,
or the hearing of preaching, is the first necessity of the religious
life. It unites us as nothing else can do with God the whole and God
the transcendent. The conception of God is the sum total of human
needs and desires harmonized, unified, concretely expressed. It is the
faith of the worshiper that this concept is derived from a real and
objective Being in some way corresponding to it. No one can measure
the influence of such an idea when it dominates the consciousness of
any given period. It can create and set going new desires and habits,
it can minish and repress old ones, because this idea carries, with
its transcendent conception, the dynamic quality which belongs to
the idea of perfect power. But this transcendent conception, being
essentially of something beyond, without and above ourselves can only
be "realized" through the feeling and the imagination, whose province
it is to deal with the supersensuous values, with the fringes of
understanding, with the farthest bounds of knowledge. These make the
springboard, so to speak, from which man dares to launch himself into
that sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor measure,
but which nevertheless we may perceive and feel, which in some sense
we know to be there.

So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely beginning at the
beginning and starting at the bottom. And, in the light of this
observation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churches
today and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is not
too much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant
communities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in the
nature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They have a naivete,
an incongruity, that can only be explained on the assumption of their
impoverished background.

This situation shows first in the heterogeneous character of our
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 h