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.