Our fathers' communities were
a slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancient
civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced
by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All their
life was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the
most elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worship
corresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think,
that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service
with its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society which
produced them elements both of high formality and conscious reverence
which they could not possibly offer to our luxurious, sophisticated
and wealthy age.
Is it not a dangerous thing to have brought an ever increasing
formality and recognition of a developed and sophisticated community
into our social and intellectual life but to have allowed our
religious expression to remain so anachronistic? Largely for social
and economic reasons we send most of our young men and young women
to college. There we deliberately cultivate in them the perception
of beauty, the sense of form, various expressions of the imaginative
life. But how much has our average non-liturgical service to offer
to their critically trained perceptions? Our church habits are pretty
largely the transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions of
middle-class family life.
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