the same way worship will take its colour, its significance, its tone, its intensity, not from some abstract conception, but from the end it seeks.  This is made plain, too, when we look at our Bibles and Prayer Books for the actual use of the word.  There we find much of the worship of God:  but we also find a limited use of the word.  “Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.” (S.  Luke, XIV, 10.) And in the marriage service of the English Prayer Book we read:  “With this ring I thee wed, and with my body I thee worship.”  The same limited content of the word is found in the old title of respect—­“Your Worship.”

But so thoroughly has the word worship become associated with our approach to God, that we still, many of us, no doubt, feel the shock of the unaccustomed when we hear the worship of the Blessed Virgin or of the saints spoken of.  It does not help us much to fall back on the Latin word, Cultus, for we understand that the meaning is the same.

We are helped, I think, if we substitute the parallel word honour for worship in the places of its use.  We meet in the Church to honour God, and we offer the Blessed Sacrifice as the act of supreme honour which is due to Him alone; but in connection with the supreme honour offered to God we also honour the saints of God by the observance of their anniversaries with special services including the Holy Sacrifice.  The word honour does not sound so ill to ears unaccustomed to a certain type of Catholic expression as the word worship:  but the meaning is untouched.

Let us go on then to the analysis of the notion of worship.  In the writings of theologians we find an analysis of the notion of worship into three degrees.  There is, first of all, that supreme degree of worship which is called latria and which is the worship due to God alone.  If we ask what essentially it is that differentiates latria from all other degrees of worship or honour we find that it is the element of sacrifice that it contains.  Sacrifice is the supreme act of self-surrender to another, of utter self-immolation, and it can have no other legitimate object than God Himself.  The central notion of sacrifice is the surrender of self.  The sacrifices of the Old Covenant were of value because they were the representatives of the nation and of the individuals who offered them; because of the self-identification of nation or individual with the thing offered, which must therefore be in some sense the offerer’s, must, so to say, contain him:  must be that in which he merges himself.  So the one Sacrifice of the New Covenant gets its essential value in that it is the surrender of the Son to the will of the Father.  “I am come to do Thy will, O God.”  Christ’s sacrifice is self-sacrifice:  the voluntary surrender of the whole life to the divine purpose.