But this transcendent conception, being
essentially of something beyond, without and above ourselves can only
be "realized" through the feeling and the imagination, whose province
it is to deal with the supersensuous values, with the fringes of
understanding, with the farthest bounds of knowledge. These make the
springboard, so to speak, from which man dares to launch himself into
that sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor measure,
but which nevertheless we may perceive and feel, which in some sense
we know to be there.
So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely beginning at the
beginning and starting at the bottom. And, in the light of this
observation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churches
today and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is not
too much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant
communities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in the
nature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They have a naivete,
an incongruity, that can only be explained on the assumption of their
impoverished background.
This situation shows first in the heterogeneous character of our
experiments. We are continually printing on our churches' calendars
what we usually call "programs," but which are meant to be orders
of worship. We are also forever changing them.
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