Public Worship.
Few observing persons have failed to remark the great change which within a few years has been wrought in the ideas of people at large in regard to public worship. It is not confined to any one of the religious denominations around us. It pervades all, from the High-Church Episcopalian to those who still cling to the law of Moses. Insensibly, it may be, but surely, the growth has all been in one direction, as surely as the germ in the earth pushes towards the light.
Time was when the plain, unadorned meeting-house of the Society of Friends seemed the type all sought to attain in architecture; painting and decoration would have caused a thrill of horror; Gothic architecture, with groined roof and stained glass, were as far removed from the thoughts and ideas as the Crusades; and if the sister art of music was admitted within the portals of the room reserved for worship, the execution was of such a fearful character that Old Folks' Concerts make it a sure guide to success, to mimic, for the amusement of this generation, the strange religious music of half a century ago.
Then religion, as expressed in public worship, was plain, stern, hard, unsympathetic, responsive to none of the finer feelings, the loftier aspirations, the panting hopes of human nature feeling its misery, but still looking heavenward.
Now the change has come. Insensibly, almost unconsciously, they have all more or less come to confess their error. Just as they are returning to the genuine Lord's Prayer, after inflicting a spurious one on their votaries for three centuries; just as they are returning to the true reading of the Greek Testament, after three centuries' bondage to the Received Text, so they are returning, after three centuries of dry, hard, formal worship, to something more in unison with man's nature, man's soul, and man's heart.
But how? The Reformation, that stern, matter-of-fact revolt, not only stripped religion of all its poetry, whether manifested in the carven stone, the painted glass or canvas, the strains of more than earthly music, but it did more: it struck at the life of worship; and the present movement which has made synagogues into temples and meeting-houses [pg 323] into churches—the work of men who “builded better than they knew”—yet is but a factitious life; it is placing artificial fruit and leaves and flowers on a dead trunk that has no vivifying sap to send through all the full, gushing tide of life.
What is public worship?
Is there really a question of the day that can be brought home to practical men like our American countrymen more distinctly than this? Long creeds and the discussion of their various points, the old controversies and chopping of texts, seem to have become singularly distasteful to the men of our day. But the divine worship is a point that, presented squarely and plainly, is easily grasped, and really involves in itself everything. It is the generating principle, the fountain of faith and works.
About a century ago, in London, the question of worship was debated by some of the leading ministers of the day, and the pamphlets form volumes. A more vague series of arguments on all sides can scarcely be found; all seemed to turn round and round the text that men were to “worship God in spirit and truth,” but in what precise way was a matter none seemed able to approach, even in the most remote manner. What constituted practically the public worship of the Almighty seemed to be a point that was utterly indefinite and indefinable.
Suppose, now, we were to ask the clergymen or laymen of the denominations around us, What is the essential element of public worship, as distinguished, on the one hand, from preaching, and on the other from family worship of prayer? What would the answer be?
Public worship has, in common ideas, come to be almost identical with preaching. The preacher makes the church; his popularity is its success; with his decline in health, vigor, or voice, the church begins to melt away, and a new preacher has to be evoked to give it life. But oral instruction of the people, laudable as it may be, is not public worship; it is addressed to the people, while worship is addressed to God. The prevailing confusion of ideas on this point has turned the extemporaneous prayers which in form are still addressed to the Deity really into appeals to the people; so that the reporter who spoke of a prayer as being the most eloquent ever addressed to a Boston congregation was correct in fact, though the form was against him.
Preaching does not constitute public worship. The object of preaching is the people; the object of worship is God.
What, then, is the essential element? Prayer recited or chanted—prayer extemporaneous or in forms grown venerable by use, is common alike to public and private worship, to the worship of the individual in his closet, the family, or the gathering of families. It cannot be the essential element of public worship. What, then, is the essential element, or, if there be none, how can this public worship have any claim on the individual that may not be satisfied by him alone, as in the case of Dr. Bellows' preferring isolation on the steamer's deck to joining in the religious exercises carried on below?
But there is certainly an obligation to render public worship to the Almighty. The Sabbath rest prescribed by the Mosaic law was negative and subsidiary to the positive [pg 324] command to worship God. It did not tell what was to be done; that was provided elsewhere with the most detailed injunctions.
Even as ideas have changed on one point, so they have on another.
With the Reformers of the XVIth century, faith was all and everything. Now we have reached a time when faith has lost its ground; and, in the thousands around us, nine out of ten will tell you that it makes no difference what a man believes; if his life is right, he is safe. But yet they make a distinction in works. It is not all works that have value in the eyes of the world; it is those of benevolence—the corporal works of mercy. They will shrug their shoulders and allow some little value to the spiritual works of mercy, but it will not be much. Yet these works of mercy, whether corporal or spiritual, have for their object our neighbor. There is, however, a higher class of works—those which have God for their object.
Good works towards God! some will exclaim; what need has God of our good works? The need may be on our side, and the question is not one of need, but of duty on our part.
Love is the fulfilling of the law—“he that loveth me keepeth my commandments.” The Commandments to be kept, the works to be done, are written on the two tables of the law; and the works to be done towards God form the first and greater Commandment, and foremost on it—first of the good works of which God is the object—is worship, public and private.
Have not common ideas, then, perverted the whole order? With the higher appreciation of good works that is growing so visibly will come a logical placing of them. The first table will reassert its rights; the great good work towards God, public worship, will take its rightful place, and be regarded as the great, imperative act on the part of man.
If so important, it must have its distinctive characteristics, its essential elements—some thymiama exclusively assigned to it, never given, we say, not to any mean use, but to high or holy use or honor of anything that is not God.
Should no one around us tell what this element is, we must go back to the past. The first Commandment, in its positive form, is: “The Lord thy God thou shalt adore, and him only shalt thou serve.” In what essentially does this adoration and service consist?
If we open the two oldest books we have—the Bible, record of a people who preserved their faith in God; Homer, describing the life of a nation fallen so early into idolatry that it preserved no tradition of the time when the unity of God was acknowledged—if we open these to see what in the earliest ages constituted divine worship, we find the answer clear and plain—Sacrifice.
Leave the shores of the Mediterranean, strike to India, China, the islands of the Pacific, and ask what constitutes public worship, the answer still is, Sacrifice. Reach the western shores of America, question every tribe, from the more savage nomads of the north and south to the more cultured Aztecs, to the subjects of the Incas, and the answer never varies; it is, Sacrifice.
Cross the Atlantic as you crossed the Pacific, the Celts of the Isles and of Gaul, Scandinavian and [pg 325] German, repeat the burden, Sacrifice, till you come again to the tents of the patriarchs on the plains of the Euphrates or Jordan.
And what was sacrifice? A rite cruel, repugnant to all our ideas—one that could not spring from man himself. It was the offering of an inferior life to the offended Deity as a substitute for man's life forfeited by sin—a substitute deriving its value from a human life that was one day to appease the Almighty absolutely.
The whole system is strange, yet the whole is universal. Before man slew the beasts of the field for food, he slew them on the altar. Not Cain, unaccepted of God, offers this bloody sacrifice. Doubly the type of sinful man—sinful by descent and by act—Cain offers the fruits of the earth—badge of sin and toil and sweat of brow; while Abel, pure and gentle, slays the lamb that gambols affectionately around him—slays it to find favor with a God of love. It could not have entered into the heart of man to conceive this. Nothing less than a primitive revelation and command can explain sacrifice—that offering of domestic animals as a type of the great atoning sacrifice of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
No matter how widely removed from the original seat of the race, no matter how low in the grade of civilization, every known tribe on earth has a worship and has sacrifices. The red men of our own land were long considered as an anomaly in this respect; but they really had the whole idea of sacrifice. One example will show it. When F. Jogues, the pioneer priest of New York, was taken by the Mohawks in 1642, and reduced to the condition of a slave, he attended a hunting party of the tribe. Ill success in war and hunt had befallen the Mohawks, and, ascribing it to their offended deity, they offered to this demon Aireskoi two bears with this prayer: “Justly dost thou punish us, O demon Aireskoi!... We have sinned against thee, in that we ate not the last captives thrown into our hands; but if we shall ever again capture any, we promise to devour them as we now consume these two bears”—recognizing the idea of substitution and the efficacy of human blood as the great means of reconciliation. And the missionary, to his horror, saw two women sacrificed and eaten in fulfilment of this vow.
While the temple of Jerusalem stood, the Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian, the Gaul, and the German would, on entering, have seen naught removed from their ideas in the sacrifice offered. They might have wondered at the size and beauty of the temple, the rich vestments of the sons of Aaron; they might have been filled with awe at the absence of the image of the deity worshipped there so grandly; but in the great rite of sacrifice, there was nothing that was not familiar to them. In this the pagan nations were still in harmony with the divine institution; and in default of the Mosaic revelation, its appositeness could be proved by the common consent of mankind in a matter inexplicable except on the supposition of a primitive revelation.
The nearer and more striking the resemblance between the pagan sacrifices and those of the people of God, the greater the evidence they bear to corroborate it. Error may be old, but truth is older.
What, then, is the meaning of [pg 326] this ancient worship? The answer is plain: “Jesus Christ, yesterday and to-day and for ever”—“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” whose death was, when once accomplished in act, to be thenceforward shown forth until he came.
The offering on Calvary alone gave life and efficacy to all the sacrifices of Adam, of the patriarchs before and after the Flood, of the sacrifices of Abraham, and those who, in his day, still believed in the true God, in the sacrifices of the law promulgated by Moses.
Their sacrifices were but types and figures—substitutes for that which was to be accomplished in the person of the Messias; when that was once accomplished, it became the act of public worship, to be offered by man to the end of time.
The public worship of the new law is the sacrifice of Calvary, not renewed, not repeated—for “Christ dieth now no more”—but “shown forth,” made sensible.
The essential element of public worship is the death of the Man-God on Calvary; and under the new law, this must be shown in something higher and nobler than the types and animal sacrifices of the old law. It is the one sufficient act of worship, fulfilling all the intentions and designs of the ancient typical sacrifices—adoration, praise, thanksgiving, propitiation, and impetration. No public worship that does not directly connect itself with this great sacrifice can be at all a public worship acceptable to God.
The Almighty has certainly instituted a worship showing forth this death, and that alone will he accept.
Man cannot set up a public worship for himself. Worship is a debt which man owes to the Most High, and it is not for the debtor to fix the mode of paying that debt. In the discussion alluded to already, they frequently quoted the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman, but overlooked the great lesson of that whole incident. When that erring woman, pressed hard on her moral delinquency, changed the subject, with womanly adroitness, to the great religious division between the Jews and Samaritans, she asked: “Our fathers adored on this mountain; and you say that at Jerusalem is the place that men must adore”—meaning, evidently, “offer the sacrifices of the law.”
Christ answered: “Salvation is with the Jews.” The Mosaic church was the ark, and out of it there was no salvation. And yet the Samaritans had, according to modern ideas, every requisite. They had the law of Moses, and revered and followed it closely; they had priests of the sons of Aaron, won to their side; they offered all the sacrifices commanded by the law, and as the law commanded; and they had and exercised the right of private judgment in the matter of the place. And precisely this last point vitiated the whole, and made their sacrifices utterly worthless in the eyes of God. They did not conduce to salvation. To be in the way of salvation, they must be in communion with the high-priest at Jerusalem, and their sacrifices could not be vivified by man or angel. They were worthless. “Salvation was with the Jews.”
The essential element of public worship is, then, the sacrifice of Calvary; and the public worship of the new law must be connected with that act by divine institution. No institution devised by private [pg 327] judgment, however seemingly fit to human eyes, can have any real value. It is not for man to make, by his private judgment, a form of public worship that will avoid the sentence, “Salvation is not in it.” As the figurative sacrifices of the old law derived their value from divine institution as typical of Calvary, so the public worship of the new law must be connected with Calvary by divine institution.
Now, in the popular forms of public worship in our days, there is no essential element, either of divine or human creation, to connect it with Calvary. It is inferior even to the Samaritan worship, which Christ so decisively condemned. What claims, then, can it have?
The Catholic who is asked why he cannot attend a Protestant worship finds his answer here. “Why,” it will be said, “there can be no harm in it. Reading the Scriptures, singing psalms out of Holy Writ, and a moral explanation of some part of Scripture cannot but be good.” Even supposing the explanation to contain nothing contrary to faith, a Catholic cannot accept it. It is not of God's institution, and, as unauthorized and human, must be rejected of God. There was no detail in the Samaritan worship that a Jew could condemn, yet he had to condemn it as a whole; for, by God's institution, all this, done on Mount Sion, was acceptable to him and contributed to salvation; done elsewhere, was repugnant and availed not.
So absolute is the necessity of adhering to divine institution to give any value to our religious acts that we see in the Acts that the Jewish priests, whose authority had been so fully sustained, were, by the institution of the priesthood of the new law, superseded; and when they attempted to exercise functions under the new law, the very devils laughed them to scorn. If men of a priesthood instituted by God had thus lost power, how could men self-constituted make themselves more acceptable, or create a form of worship that could be acceptable, to God?
Nor can any such power exist in the civil authority, be it emperor, king, parliament, or congress. Saul, usurping the headship of the church and the functions of the priesthood, only drew down judgment on himself, and his race ceased to rule over the people.
The only example in the old law that even remotely resembles the liberty assumed in the last centuries by men to form modes of worship is that of Michas in the Book of Judges, who made his own god, his own temple, his worship, and constituted one of his sons as priest till he was able to obtain an apostate Levite.
Man, of himself, would have as much right to make his god like Michas as to make his worship. He can make neither, and cannot give saving power to his form of worship any more than he can divinity to the deity his brain may devise.
Let us, then, see whether there exists under the new law an institution in which the one great sacrifice of Calvary is made perpetually present to the end of time. The Reformers, before introducing their own experimental forms of public worship, since so varied—now reduced to the plainest form, then more cheering, but all based on the synagogue service of the Jews, which was not divine worship, as the temple service was—rejected a form of public worship coeval and coextensive with Christendom, full [pg 328] of the spirit and echo of the temple service of Jerusalem, that was really and solely divine worship—they rejected the Mass.
The Jews even now recognize that their synagogue service is not worship; they still admit the necessity of a sacrifice, as witness one of the most common forms of prayer offered up in the synagogue: “O Lord, in the time when the temple stood, when a sin was committed the guilty one brought sacrifices, and it was atoned unto him; but now, through our sins, we have no temple, no altar, no priests to offer up sacrifices which shall atone for our sins. Let the remembrance of our prayers, of the many prayers we offer up, O Lord, be acceptable in the place of sacrifices.”
There had been heresies and schisms before the XVIth century. They had been almost countless; but Arian and Pelagian, Donatist and Nestorian, all retained the Mass, the authority of all tradition, in Asia, Europe, and Africa, making it too daring an attempt for any to endeavor to modify or abolish it. By the concurrent testimony of all Christians of every tongue and land the Mass was the public worship of God, instituted by the apostles under the command of Jesus Christ and the direction of the Holy Ghost; and to this day it is retained in the Oriental lands, where the apostles and their immediate successors preached, although many of those countries have for centuries rejected the spiritual authority of Rome, and would not adopt the slightest form or ceremony peculiar to the Latin Church.
A movement against the Mass could not arise in any of these lands. It could arise only in nations just emerged from the darkness of paganism, with its spirit still strong within them, and with no apostolic tradition to inspire them with reverence.
The German race, last to accept the Gospel, was the first to reject it. The Real Presence was denied, and with that dogma they cast aside the Mass as the great act of public worship, and the whole theory of the Christian priesthood. In England alone an attempt was made to keep a hollow form and a compromise which James I. sneeringly styled an ill-said Mass.
In each country, government or individuals then attempted to get up something to take the place of the public worship which had for fifteen centuries gathered Christians around the altar of God, and, while all cried for liberty, made the new forms obligatory by civil law; and in England, the government, by fine and imprisonment, compelled men to go to the churches torn from Catholic worship, in order to follow the newly-devised common prayer; and in New England, men who turned with loathing from this, punished just as stringently all who dissented from the standing order or refused to attend the congregational form of worship. Yet both were confessedly mere human inventions, to which no more divine sanction could be ascribed than to the form of opening a court of justice.
Of course the first generation of the Reformed recollected the old Catholic worship, and kept up some resemblance to it; but as the memory died away, one point after another was cast aside, till every original trace was lost, and everything was made as bald and plain as possible.
Then a new great discovery was made. Satisfied with their own position, they looked at the Catholic worship, now become strange and [pg 329] wonderful in their eyes, and they discovered a striking analogy between it and pagan worship. Middleton, in the last century, expatiated wonderfully on the point; and our readers know how offensively our fluent, superficial Prescott, in his Conquest of Mexico, draws the comparison. But these men never seem to have thought that God might have his own views of his own worship, and that he could not have left the world without a guide on this point; they forgot that one fully explained type of worship of the ante-Christian era was before us to guide us in our search.
Take one of our average countrymen, from Prescott's own State, and set him down in the temple of Jerusalem while the high-priest was still offering the sacrifices of the law. What would his impressions be? He would certainly deem it a very pagan affair; the architecture would, in his eyes, be unsuited to a meeting-house; the vestments heathenish or—what to him would perhaps be synonymous—popish; the incense clearly so; and a radical defect in the whole would be, in his eyes, that the congregation took no part, and that the building was not adapted to preaching.
If, at the morning hour of prayer, or when the shadow of Mount Sion fell lengthening towards the Mediterranean, he entered the sacred enclosure, and beheld the priest, in rich robe, enter, incense in hand, to offer it on the golden altar, while the people were kept rigorously without, he would have found it sadly at variance with his ideas.
If, as the sun began to gild the golden face of the tower, he saw a devout Jew coming with his wife and little ones, bearing in his arms a lamb, to have it offered in sacrifice for him or some sick child at home, and taking back part to eat as part of the religious rite, he would think all this needed reforming, and that it was very nearly as bad as the popish way of having Masses said.
The only question would be whether the Almighty was wrong, or whether his own stand-point was utterly wrong.
Certainly, neither in the Jewish temple service nor in the worship of any pagan nation could he find the type of his own. The pagan had strong and striking resemblances with the Jewish; the worship of Christendom grew out of the Jewish temple service.
To this day chants echo through Catholic aisles that were first heard on Mount Sion. To the Catholic the old temple service would be intelligible; the edifice, the vestments, the incense, the priestly performing of a great act, would all be in harmony with ideas with which he had been imbued from youth; to him there would be the most natural of natural things in having sacrifice offered for him or his; he would kneel without in the crowd, offering, through the priest within, the smoking incense—offering it, as each one around him did, for his own wants of soul or body. In all the ideas of worship of the Jew he would be at home, and could join in the same spirit in every religious act that marked life from circumcision till the Kadisch, or prayer for the dead, poured forth beside the grave in the valley of Josaphat.
Those who find the Catholic worship too like the pagan would have condemned the divinely-instituted worship of the Mosaic law as still more like it. That paganism bears its testimony to the Catholic worship is an argument [pg 330] in its favor, not against it; for the pagan worship was a divine institution, perverted more in its object than in its form. Had it been purely the coinage of man's brain, of man's private judgment—one of those ways that seem right unto a man, though the ends thereof lead to death—there would be no such resemblance.
Is it not a striking fact that the Catholic, trained to the worship of his church, would be at home in the temple of Jerusalem during that divinely-instituted worship, while to the Protestant it would be utterly repugnant?
The Mass in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Abyssinian, Sclavonic, is almost identical, and in all rites claims to have been instituted by the apostles by divine authority. The form is the same, though varying parts have varied. The Jewish worship was simply action; the Christian worship has, from the earliest period, combined action and a form of words. The language of the Mass is older than any of the books of the New Testament. Is it unworthy of the great act? The answer will best be a challenge to produce anything, from the days of the Reformation, which can at all approach it in grandeur; in its recognition of all the attributes of God and of the nothingness of man in his sight; in all and everything that could embody the idea of worship. It has, perhaps, the most sublime thought ever written. Longinus quoted the “Let there be light, and there was light,” as a sublime thought that paganism admired. Yet this record of the creative act is less sublime than “We thank thee for thy great glory.” That man, the creature of God, should thank him for existence, for his intellect and body, for truth imparted, for life, health, happiness, for loved ones and their love, for all the blessings ever bestowed on him, or, soaring higher, ever bestowed on men and angels, might be admirable; but when man, losing sight entirely of himself and of all created things, looks up to God, and, overwhelmed with love, thanks him for his great glory, for his attributes, for being what he is, he soars from the depths of nothingness to the height of sublimity. One of the modern objections to religion is its selfish character; the Mass answers this by its utter abnegation of self, just as it formally disavows the sufficiency of human works.
The action is worthy of divine worship. A man stands at the altar, not self-instituted, but called as Aaron and his race were—stands there with powers traced back through the apostles to Christ. He approaches as a sinner among sinners, acknowledging his unworthiness, striking his breast with the publican, not vaunting himself with the Pharisee. Then follow soon the glorious canticle, in which the sinner rises, in thought and hope, to God, prayer, lessons from the Old Testament or the New, a portion of the gospels, a solemn profession of faith. Then properly begins the Sacrifice, at which, in early days, only the baptized could be present, and not even such of them as were subjects of public penance.
Bread and wine appear on the altar. Even among the pagans, fruits of the earth were offered to inferior deities alone. In the Bible, they mark the sinful race, like Cain, or men without the chosen people, like Melchisedec. It is in itself an inferior offering, and bears the stamp of man's fall. Bread and wine are doubly suggestive. It is not merely fruits of the earth raised by man's toil and the sweat of [pg 331] his brow; it is food prepared by still further toil.
The priest stands there as the type of fallen man, with such offering as fallen man can give; but if this were all, his sacrifice would be but that of Melchisedec. His language shows that the sacrifice has, so to speak, no beginning or end; that it is one act, and that time is not regarded. The bread and wine are treated, not as what they are, but what they are to become. It is not that the sacrifice of guilty Cain may become that of the pious Abel, the sacrifice of the uncalled Melchisedec become that of Abraham the elect; not that this sacrifice of fallen man may become the Paschal lamb, but Christ our Pasch himself; and such it is in thought already when the priest offers the bread as an immaculate host, and the wine as the chalice of salvation—offers them for his own sins and those of all Christians; for the salvation of those present and that of the whole world. He offers it again in memory of the passion, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord, and in honor of all who have faithfully served him on earth.
He never separates himself from the people for whom he offers it. From the commencement to the end, it is their sacrifice and his; in fact, as if to prevent any forgetfulness of this, he turns, as the awful moment of consecration approaches, to say: “Brethren, pray that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Father Almighty.”
Then, with the Preface that sounds like the triumphant march of an approaching monarch, comes the consecration. The types of sinful man disappear, and Jesus Christ is all. He is the priest; he is the victim. He makes the only oblation that can take away sin. He offers the only victim which can render his Eternal Father due adoration, homage, and honor; which can alone call down graces and blessings.
The priest and people, adoring the divine High-Priest and Victim, offer through him that sacrifice of Calvary for all mankind, for the living and the dead, for the church and all its members. Then, repeating the prayer he himself enjoined, the divine Victim is consumed, and the solemn rite hastens to a close.
Sublime in its conception, sublime in all its parts, sublime alike in action and in words, the world has never beheld a more adequate public worship of God. In itself, in its antiquity, its wide extent, it is one of the strongest arguments in favor of the church. Its wonderful adaptability to all nations and all conditions of social elevation are no less striking. A public worship, in which the most polished and cultivated minds of civilized nations can join, absorbed and taking part, while the poor peasant enters as well into its spirit, and offers it for all his wants; a sacrifice that can come home to the savage and the sage, to men of the frozen North and the parching tropics, which makes the church a home in all lands where not a syllable uttered in the streets falls familiar on the ear—such is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass of the Catholic Church—a worship distinct from any other service, offered to God alone, and combining in the highest degree everything that can be conceived as fitting in that great act—divine institution, the character of sacrifice, identity with the oblation of Calvary—the only adequate worship ever offered to God.