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?