" And one remembers the justice of Charles
Kingsley's fling at the Dissenters that they were "creatures who
went to church to hear sermons!" It would seem evident, then, that a
renewal of worship would be the logical accompaniment of a return to
distinctly religious values in society and church.
What can we do, then, better for an age of paganism than to cultivate
this transcendent consciousness? Direct men away from God the
universal and impersonal to God the particular and intimate. Nothing
is more needed for our age than to insist upon the truth that there
are both common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; that
these are not contradictory; that they are complementary; that they
are not identical. It is the church's business to insist that men
must live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular,
in order to be able to surmount and endure the secular, the common and
the universal. It is her business to insist that through worship
all this can be accomplished. But can worship be taught? Is not the
devotee, like the poet or the lover or any other genius, born and
not made? Well, whether it can be taught or not, it at least can be
cultivated and developed, and there are three very practical ways in
which this cultivation can be brought about.
One of them is by paying intelligent attention to the physical
surroundings of the worshiper.
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