Has the worship of God through the mediation of Christ entirely superseded—was it intended to supersede—the worship of God through the mediation of the visible World? I think not yet. It will in the end but not now. There may come a time, in some future existence, when we shall see righteousness like the sun, when we shall have visions of the beauty and order of holiness like the stars, and behold the glory of sacrifice spread out before our eyes like the firmament of heaven; and then the revelation of God through visible Nature will be swallowed up in the revelation of God through invisible Nature. But now, not many of us can pretend to such a power of spiritual insight. We feel that, if we learned the story of Christ without the help of the commentary of the awful powers of material nature, we might be in danger of repeating it with a glib familiarity which would hinder us from penetrating its meaning. Those who live in the stir of cities where they are doomed never to be alone, never to realize perfect silence, never to see more than a few square feet of sky, are living as the Word of God did not intend them to live; they may have—they often have—great spiritual compensations; they certainly have some spiritual disadvantage in these unnatural negations. As long as we have eyes and ears and the faculties of wonder and admiration, so long must we suppose that the revelation of the Word of God through Jesus of Nazareth has not dispensed with the revelation of the Word of God through the forces of material nature. If we wish to approach God we should not despise the Mediation of the Word of God in its entirety, that is to say, the mediation of “the World with Christ.”

Now what practical inferences follow from our definition of worship, if we are satisfied that it is roughly true? Here let me put in a caution. Our definition cannot be exactly true; for, in its exactness, worship means the sum total of all the feelings that should be felt by the mind of man, when he contemplates God through the mediation of “the World with Christ.” Who can enumerate these without confessing that he may have passed over some so subtle and so deep that language itself has left them unnamed? We must therefore be content with a rough definition. But if it be roughly true that worship means love, trust and awe, what practical inferences may we thence deduce as regards our own conduct?

First, then, worship is not the formal thing it is generally supposed to be. It is not a mere smoothness of the hinges of the knees, or a readiness to take the name of God within one’s lips. It is a natural going forth of the heart to that which one loves, trusts, and reverences most. Some men have little power of reverencing; others, of trusting; others, of loving; such men’s worship must necessarily be maimed and imperfect. If a man who is destitute of reverence loves and trusts money more than anything else, money really is that man’s God; it is no hyperbole, it is the fact; the man does actually worship money; he does not say prayers to it, does not go down on his knees to it, but he loves it and trusts it more than anything else; therefore, so far as he can worship anything, he worships money. Similarly another man worships pleasure; another, his children; another, power. We are accustomed to apologize for such expressions as if they were metaphors or exaggerations; but they are not; they are plain statements of spiritual realities. Thousands of men who say they worship Christ, and who honestly suppose they worship Christ, do nothing of the kind. This is the dark side of the self-delusion of worship, but there is a brighter. There are many men at the present day who call themselves agnostics, but who would hardly deny that they love and reverence Jesus of Nazareth more than any other being. They worship Him then. Their worship is tinged with hopelessness, and therefore imperfect; but so far as it goes, it is a genuine worship of Christ. Perhaps, too, some who profess mere Theism feel, in their hearts, that though they dislike to say they worship Christ, they love Christ more than they love their conception of “God without Christ;” if so, may we not say that, so far as that element of love goes, they worship Christ? Thousands of thousands of people, before Christ was born, worshipped Goodness and a good God in their lives and hearts, though they were, in name, worshippers of Apollo or Moloch. Thousands of people in the same unconscious way have been, and still are, worshipping the Incarnate Christ. They may not acknowledge this, they may not even know it: but their hearts have gone out to Him in love and trust and awe, more than to any other person or thing in heaven or earth.[[8]]

Search your own soul and acknowledge how little you know of God; I do not mean how little you profess to know, but how little you really know; how very much of what you think you know, is but second-hand knowledge, scraps of sayings repeated on authority, but not representing any heartfelt faith. Then—after deducting all the verbiage that you once esteemed a part of your own belief—take the poor residuum of your conception of the Godhead, and put it by the side of your conception of the Word of God incarnate in Christ, making some faint attempt at the same time to realize the stupendous life and character of Jesus. Then ask yourself in what respects the former conception differs from the latter for the better. Lastly ask yourself what you mean by worship—not lip-worship, or knee-worship, but the worship of the heart; and whether your heart does not go out in heart-worship as much towards the latter as to the former of these two conceptions. If you will do this fairly and honestly, my only fear would be that you might find that your conception of God Himself was too weak to retain its grasp on you; but if God still held His place in your heart, then I should feel confident that Christ would sit enthroned by His side, as being the Son without whom the Father could not be known, worshipped in virtue of a claim which no mere performance of miracles could establish, and which no mere non-performance of miracles could invalidate.

The sum is this. In Nature there is evil as well as good. I cannot therefore worship the Author of all Nature, but must worship the Author of Nature-minus the evil. Where is He to be found? He is revealed in what we recognize to be good, true, and beautiful. Now no one man can include in his life all that we mean by scientific truth, and artistic beauty, as well as moral goodness. But, truth being a harmony, there is no deeper and nobler truth than the harmony of a human will with the will of the Supreme; and, beneath perishable artistic beauty, there is an eternal beauty to be discerned in righteousness. It ought not therefore to surprise us that the Eternal Word, after endeavouring for thousands of years to lead creation up from the worship of Power to the worship of Goodness, should at last take upon Himself the form of a creature, conspicuously powerless from the world’s point of view, ignorant of science, and destitute of outward beauty, but of a goodness so divinely beautiful and so true to the Underlying Laws of spiritual Nature, that when He held out His arms and called upon wandering mankind to come to Him, the enlightened conscience of humanity sought refuge in His embrace.

XII
THE WORSHIP OF CHRIST

My dear ——,

Your letter of yesterday raises two objections, which I will do my best to meet. First, if I regard Christ as God, I ought not, you think, to stumble at the miracles, but to welcome, and even to require, them; and secondly, you are not satisfied with my definition of worship. Let me deal first with your first objection, restating it in your own words.

“I admit,” you say, “that Jesus, even without miracles, would be worthy of worship in your sense of the word; but that is not the same thing as regarding Him as the Eternal Son of God, the Creative Word. I agree with Plato that there is nothing more like God than the man who is as just as man may be; but you demand more of me than this; you wish me to regard Him not as being merely ‘like God’ but as ‘being God,’ ‘very God of very God.’ Surely you must therefore admit that Jesus was exceptional, and not ‘in the course of nature;’ and the introduction into the visible world of such an exceptional and supernatural Being surely makes it antecedently probable, if not necessary, that He would bring with Him some quite exceptional phenomena in the way of evidence. The Miraculous Conception and Resurrection of Christ’s Body (if only they were true) would supply just the requisite evidence that Jesus was the Creative Word, Lord over the issues of life and death. If the creative Power of God, no less than the Righteousness and the Love of God, was incarnate in the person of Jesus, it would have been no less manifest in His life and works. But you desire to reduce Him to a being in no way distinguishable from other men except by superior moral excellence. There is, it seems to me, no logical connection between moral excellence and creative power. The two attributes, being generically different, demand different kinds of evidence to substantiate them.

“Again,” you continue, “even if I put aside your contention that Jesus is the Word of God, there remains your assertion that He is sinless. Now a sinless Jesus is, in Himself, a miracle; and if you call on me to believe that Jesus was without sin, you ought to see no antecedent improbability, nay, you ought to see an antecedent probability, that He would work miracles.”