Admiration is the response of a growing intelligence to beauty, partly an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience.  These distinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sentence “In wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills up the interspace.  But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance; the last is the parent of adoration.”  Awe is the sense-perception of the stupendous power and magnitude of the universe; it is, quite literally, a godly fear.  But it is not ignoble nor cringing, it is just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, of a comprehensive sanity.

Thus “I would love Thee, O God, if there were no heaven, and if there were no hell, I would fear Thee no less.”  Reverence is devotion to goodness, sense of awe-struck loyalty to a Being manifestly under the influence of principles higher than our own.[41] Now it is with these last two, awe and reverence, rather than wonder and admiration, that worship has to do.

[Footnote 41:  For a discussion of these four words see Allen, Reverence as the Heart of Christianity, pp. 253 ff.]

Hence the essence of worship is not aesthetic contemplation.  Without doubt worship does gratify the aesthetic instinct and most properly so.  There is no normal expression of man’s nature which has not its accompanying delight.  The higher and more inclusive the expression the more exquisite, of course, the delight.  But that pleasure is the by-product, not the object, of worship.  It itself springs partly from the awe of the infinite and eternal majesty which induces the desire to prostrate oneself before the Lord our Maker.  “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear:  but now mine eye seeth Thee.  Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”  It also springs partly from passionate devotion of a loyal will to a holy Being.  “Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters and as the eyes of a maid unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon the Lord.”  Thus reverence is the high and awe-struck hunger for spiritual communion.  “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.  When shall I come and appear before God?”

There is a noble illustration of the nature and the uses of worship in the Journals of Jonathan Edwards, distinguished alumnus of Yale College, and the greatest mind this hemisphere has produced.  You remember what he wrote in them, as a youth, about the young woman who later became his wife:  “They say there is a young lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some way or other invisible comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on Him.  Therefore if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not for it and is unmindful of