The result of this unified consciousness is peace and the
result of this peace and harmony is a new sense of power. Worship,
then, is the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one form
or another all religion strives by means of contemplation. So by its
very nature it belongs to the class of the absolutes.
Many psychologies of religion define this contemplation as aesthetic,
and make worship a higher form of delight. This appears to me a quite
typical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience. There
are four words which need explaining when we talk of worship. They
are: wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder springs from the
recognition of the limitations of our knowledge; it is an experience
of the mind. Admiration is the response of a growing intelligence to
beauty, partly an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience. These
distinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sentence "In
wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills
up the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance;
the last is the parent of adoration." Awe is the sense-perception
of the stupendous power and magnitude of the universe; it is, quite
literally, a godly fear. But it is not ignoble nor cringing, it
is just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, of a
comprehensive sanity.
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