ave 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 a