them against the danger of neglecting rites and ceremonies.
On the other hand, it may be confidently stated that
when religious worship has become a customary social
act, a man who sympathises with the religious idea
is right to show public sympathy with it; he ought
to weigh very carefully his motives for abstaining.
If it is indolence, or a fear of being thought precise,
or a desire to be thought independent, or a contempt
for sentiment that keeps him back, he is probably
in the wrong; nothing but a genuine and deep-seated
horror of formalism justifies him in protesting against
a practice which is to many an avenue of the spiritual
life. A lack of sympathy with certain liturgical
expressions, a fear of being hypocritical, of being
believed to hold the orthodox position in its entirety,
justifies a man in not entering the ministry of the
Church, even if he desires on general grounds to do
so, but these are paltry motives for cutting oneself
off from communion with believers. It is clear
that Christ himself thought many of the orthodox practices
of the exponents of the popular religion wrong, but
he did not for that reason abjure attendance upon
accustomed rites; and it is far more important to
show sympathy with an idea, even if one does not agree
with all the details, than to seem, by protesting against
erroneous detail, to be out of sympathy with the idea.
The mistake is when a man drifts into thinking of
ceremonial worship as a practice specially and uniquely
dear to God; every practice by which the spiritual
principle is asserted above the material principle
is dear to God, and a man who reads a beautiful poem
and is thrilled with a desire for purity, goodness,
and love thereby, is a truer worshipper of the Spirit
than a man who mutters responses in a prescribed posture
without deriving any inspiration from them.
The essence of religion is to desire to draw near
to God, to receive the Spirit of God. It does
not in the least degree matter how the individual
expresses that essential truth. He may love some
consecrated rite as being pure and beautiful, or even
because other hearts have loved it,—the
rite is permitted, not commanded by God—he
may express God by terms of co-equality and consubstantiality,
and even desire to proclaim such expressions, in concert
with like-minded persons, to the harmonies of an organ,
so long as it uplifts him in spirit; but such a man
falls into a grievous error when he vilifies or condemns
others for not seeing as he does, or enunciates that
thus and thus only can a man apprehend God. The
more firmly that a Church holds the necessity of what
is unessential, the more it diverges from the Spirit
of Christ.