of righteousness and holiness seem to be naturally exalted above the physical, the commercial, the domestic affairs of men; to lift the level of thought and feeling to that high place where the spiritual consciousness contributes its insights and finds a magnanimous utterance—­is there anything that our world needs more?  There are noble and necessary ministries to the body and the mind, but most needed, and least often offered, there is a ministry to the human spirit.  This is the gift which the worshiper can bring.  Knowledge of God may not be merely or even chiefly comprehended in a concept of the intelligence; knowledge of Him is that vitalizing consciousness of the Presence felt in the heart, which opens our eyes that we may see that the mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about us and that they who fight with us are more than they who fight with them.  This is the true and central knowledge that private devotion and public worship alone can give; preaching can but conserve and transmit this religious experience through the mind, worship creates it in the heart.  Edwards understood that neither thought nor conduct can take its place.  “The sober performance of moral duty,” said he, “is no substitute for passionate devotion to a Being with its occasional moments of joy and exaltation.”

We should then begin with worship.  A church which does not emphasize it before everything else is trying to build the structure of a spiritual society with the corner stone left out.  Let us try, first of all, to define it.  An old and popular definition of the descriptive sort says that “worship is the response of the soul to the consciousness of being in the presence of God.”  A more modern definition, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as “the unification of consciousness around the central controlling idea of God, the prevailing emotional tone being that of adoration.”  Evidently we mean, then, by worship the appeal to the religious will through feeling and the imagination.  Worship is therefore essentially creative.  Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and there a direct experience of God through high and concentrated emotion.  It fixes the attention upon Him as an object in Himself supremely desirable.  The result of this unified consciousness is peace and the result of this peace and harmony is a new sense of power.  Worship, then, is the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one form or another all religion strives by means of contemplation.  So by its very nature it belongs to the class of the absolutes.

Many psychologies of religion define this contemplation as aesthetic, and make worship a higher form of delight.  This appears to me a quite typical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience.  There are four words which need explaining when we talk of worship.  They are:  wonder, admiration, awe, reverence.  Wonder springs from the recognition of the limitations of our knowledge; it is an experience of the mind.