stage of development, however, man sought
for God. If he thought, mistakenly, to find Him in this or that
external object, he was not wrong in the conviction that underlay his
search--the conviction that God is at no time afar off from any one of
us.

III

THE IDEA OF GOD IN WORSHIP

We have found mythology of but little use in our search after the idea
of God; and the reason, as we have suggested, is that myth-making is a
reflective process, a process in which the mind reflects upon the
idea, and therefore a process which cannot be set up unless the idea
is already present, or, rather we should say, has already been
presented. When it has been presented, it can become food for
reflection, but not until then. If then we wish to discover where and
when it is thus immediately presented, let us look for it in worship.
If it is given primarily in the moment of worship, it may be
reproduced in a secondary stage as a matter for reflection. Now, in
worship--provided that it be experienced as a reality, and not
performed as a conventionality--the community's purpose is to approach
its God: let us come before the Lord and enter His courts with praise,
are words which represent fairly the thought and feeling which, on
ordinary occasions, the man who goes to worship--really--experiences,
whether he be polytheist or monotheist. I have spoken of 'the moment
of worship,' but worship is, of course, a habit: if it is not a habit,
it ceases to be at all, in any effective sense. And it is a habit of
the community, of the common consciousness, which is continuous
through the ages, even though it slowly changes; and which, as
continuous, is conservative and tenacious. Even when it has become
monotheistic, it may continue to speak of the one God as 'a great god
above all other gods,' in terms which are survivals of an earlier
stage of belief. Such expressions are like the clouds which, though
they are lifting, still linger round the mountain top: they are part
of the vapour which had previously obscured from view the reality
which was there, and cannot be shaken at any time.

Worship may include words spoken, hymns of praise and prayer; but it
includes also things done, acts performed, ritual. It is these acts
that are the facts from which we have now to start, in order to infer
what we can from them as to the idea of God which prompted them. There
is an infinite diversity in these facts of ritual, just as the gods of
polythei