This is the true and central knowledge that
private devotion and public worship alone can give; preaching can
but conserve and transmit this religious experience through the mind,
worship creates it in the heart. Edwards understood that neither
thought nor conduct can take its place. "The sober performance of
moral duty," said he, "is no substitute for passionate devotion to a
Being with its occasional moments of joy and exaltation."
We should then begin with worship. A church which does not emphasize
it before everything else is trying to build the structure of a
spiritual society with the corner stone left out. Let us try,
first of all, to define it. An old and popular definition of the
descriptive sort says that "worship is the response of the soul to
the consciousness of being in the presence of God." A more modern
definition, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as "the
unification of consciousness around the central controlling idea of
God, the prevailing emotional tone being that of adoration." Evidently
we mean, then, by worship the appeal to the religious will through
feeling and the imagination. Worship is therefore essentially
creative. Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and there
a direct experience of God through high and concentrated emotion.
It fixes the attention upon Him as an object in Himself supremely
desirable.
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