It will be impossible for some of us ever to lose our faith in, our certainty of, this vital presence which overarches our inner lives as surely as the sky does our outer lives. The more we know of the great unveiling of God in Christ, the more we see that He is a Being who can be thus revealed in a personal life that is parallel in will with Him and perfectly responsive in heart and mind to the spiritual presence. We can use as our own the inscription on the wall of the ancient temple in Egypt. On one of the walls a priest of the old religion had written for his divinity: “I am He who was and is and ever shall be, and my veil hath no man lifted.” On the opposite wall, some one who had found his way into the later, richer faith, wrote this inscription: “Veil after veil have we lifted and ever the Face is more wonderful!”
It must be held, I think, as Emerson so well puts it, that there is “no bar or wall in the soul” separating God and man. We lie open on one side of our nature to God, who is the Oversoul of our souls, the Overmind of our minds, the Overperson of our personal selves. There are deeps in our consciousness which no private plumb line of our own can sound; there are heights in our moral conscience which no ladder of our human intelligence can scale; there are spiritual hungers, longings, yearnings, passions, which find no explanation in terms of our physical inheritance or of our outside world. We touch upon the coasts of a deeper universe, not yet explored or mapped, but no less real and certain than this one in which our mortal senses are at home. We cannot explain our normal selves or account for the best things we know—or even for our condemnation of our poorer, lower self—without an appeal to and acknowledgment of a divine Guest and Companion who is the real presence of our central being. How shall we best come into conscious fellowship with God and turn this environing presence into a positive source of inner power, and of energy for the practical tasks and duties of daily life?
It is never easy to tell in plain words what prepares the soul for intercourse with God; what it is that produces the consciousness of divine tides, the joyous certainty that our central life is being flooded and bathed by celestial currents. No person ever quite understands how his tongue utters its loftiest words, how his pen writes its noblest phrases, how his clearest insights came to him, how his most heroic deeds got done, or how the finest strands of his character were woven. Here is a mystery which we never quite uncover—a background which we never wholly explore lies along the fringes of the most illumined part of our lives. This mystery surrounds all the supreme acts of religion. They cannot be reduced to a cold and naked rational analysis. The intellect possesses no master key which unlocks all the secrets of the soul.
We can say, however, that purity of heart is one of the most essential preconditions for this high-tide experience of worship. That means, of course, much more than absence of moral impurity, freedom from soilure and stain of willful sins. It means, besides, a cleansing away of prejudice and harsh judgment. It means sincerity of soul, a believing, trusting, loving spirit. It means intensity of desire for God, singleness of purpose, integrity of heart. The flabby nature, the duplex will, the judging spirit, will hardly succeed in worshiping God in any great or transforming way.
Silence is, again, a very important condition for the great inner action which we call worship. So long as we are content to speak our own patois, to live in the din of our narrow, private affairs, and to tune our minds to stock broker’s tickers, we shall not arrive at the lofty goal of the soul’s quest. We shall hear the noises of our outer universe and nothing more. When we learn how to center down into the stillness and quiet, to listen with our souls for the whisperings of Life and Truth, to bring all our inner powers into parallelism with the set of divine currents, we shall hear tidings from the inner world at the heart and center of which is God.
But by far the most influential condition for effective worship is group-silence—the waiting, seeking, expectant attitude permeating and penetrating a gathered company of persons. We hardly know in what the group-influence consists, or why the presence of others heightens the sensitive, responsive quality in each soul, but there can be no doubt of the fact. There is some subtle telepathy that comes into play in the living silence of a congregation which makes every earnest seeker more quick to feel the presence of God, more acute of inner ear, more tender of heart to feel the bubbling of the springs of life than any one of them would be in isolation. Somehow we are able to “lend our minds out,” as Browning puts it, or at least to contribute toward the formation of an atmosphere that favors communion and coöperation with God.
If this is so, if each assists all and all in turn assist each, our responsibilities in meetings for worship are very real and very great and we must try to realize that there is a form of ministry which is dynamic even when the lips are sealed.
II
IN THE SPIRIT
There has surely been no lack of discussion on the Trinity during the centuries of Christian history! But in all the welter and turmoil of words there has been surprisingly little said about the Spirit. The nature of the Father and the Son has always been the central theme, and whatever is said of the Spirit is vague and brief. The Creeds are very precise in their accounts of God the Father and of Christ the Son, but of the Spirit, they merely say without explanation or expansion: “I believe in the Holy Spirit.”