Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

And, then, there is one other thing. What a strength prayer has been to the grandest souls of the ages! Never was truer, finer truth written than those magnificent words of Isaiah: "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint!"

Take Jesus in his hour of agony, take Savonarola with his struggle, take Huss, Wyclif, Luther, take all the grand souls of the ages when they have simply stood with the feeling, One with God is a majority, and ready to face the world, if need be, in the conviction that they spoke for and represented the truth. The times of which Lowell speaks:

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

This sense that God is for the truth and right, and, if you are standing for the truth and right, the Almighty Power is backing you up, the ground you stand on impregnable, because of that position. You do not expect God to work miracles, you do not expect him to do anything; but simply the sense that you are in his presence, that you are on his side, re- enforces you more than a thousand men could re-enforce an army in the time of its need. This is the great sense of surety that the poet Clough had in mind, when he wrote those wonderfully fine words:

"It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so; That howsoe'er I stray or range, Whate'er I do, thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, thou dost not fall." Here is the confidence, the strength, that comes from prayer, from communion with God, from the sense of being in his presence, from a feeling of fellowship with the Divine.

The truest and finest, the sweetest prayer must come oft of the loving, the sympathetic, the tender soul. No selfish prayer can expect to enter into the heart of God. You will note in the words that Jesus teaches his disciples, it is not "My" Father, it is "Our" Father. And, if we wish to pray in the divine spirit, we shall broaden that "Our" until it includes not only our family, our church, our city, our State, our nation, our humanity, but until it includes all life that swims or walks or flies, feeling that it is the one life of the Father that is in us all. For, as Coleridge has finely put it, He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

THE WORSHIP OF GOD

THERE are those who in religious matters, as well as in all other departments of life, are content to walk unquestioningly the path which the footsteps of previous generations have made easy and familiar. But there are others and these among the more thoughtful and earnest minds to whom it is not enough to utter earnest words concerning enthusiasm and devotion, consecration and worship. These spiritual attitudes and exercises must first be made to appear reasonable to them, fitting, fitting to their conception of God, fitting to their ideas of that which is highest and finest in man.

So there are many things that pass to-day as forms of worship, many ideas connected with worship, which this class of minds cannot heartily and fully accept. Some of them do not seem to them fitting, as they look upward towards God. They cannot, for example, believe that God cares for flattery, cares to sit on his throne, and be told by his creatures how great and how wonderful he is. They cannot think that he cares to have presents brought to him, gifts offered on his altar, as men say. They cannot believe that he really is anxious for many of these external forms and ceremonies, which seem to the onlooker to constitute the essential element of much that passes as popular worship.

And then, on the other hand, man has grown into a sense of dignity. He has a higher and loftier idea of his own nature and of what is fitting to a man; and he cannot any longer heartily enter into the meaning of words which speak of him as a worm of the dust, which seem to him to intimate that God cares to have him prostrate himself in utter humiliation, to speak of himself always as a miserable sinner, as one without any good in him.