any pain or affliction.  She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections, is most just and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this great Being.  She is of wonderful calmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this great God has manifested Himself to her mind.  She will sometimes go about from place to place singing sweetly and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what.  She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.”

Almost every element of worship is contained in this description.  First, we have a young human being emotionally conscious of the presence of God, who in some way or other directly but invisibly comes to her.  Secondly, we have her attention so fixed on the adoration of God that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate upon Him.  Thirdly, as the result of this worshipful approach to religious reality, we have the profound peace and harmony, the summum bonum of existence, coupled with strong moral purpose which characterize her life.  Here, then, is evidently the unification of consciousness in happy awe and the control of destiny through meditation upon infinite matters, that is, through reverent contemplation of God.  Is it not one of those ironies of history wherewith fate is forever mocking and teasing the human spirit, that the grandson of this lady and of Jonathan Edwards should have been Aaron Burr?

Clearly, then, the end of worship is to present to the mind, through the imagination, one idea, majestic and inclusive.  So it presents it chiefly through high and sustained feeling.  Worship proceeds on the understanding that one idea, remaining almost unchanged and holding the attention for a considerable length of time, so directs the emotional processes that thought and action are harmonized with it.  If one reads the great prayers of the centuries they indicate, for the most part, an unconscious understanding of this psychology of worship.  Take, for instance, this noble prayer of Pusey’s.

“Let me not seek out of Thee what I can find only in Thee, O Lord, peace and rest and joy and bliss, which abide only in thine abiding joy.  Lift up my soul above the weary round of harassing thoughts, to Thy eternal presence.  Lift up my soul to the pure, bright, serene, radiant atmosphere of Thy presence, that there I may breathe freely, there repose in Thy love, there be at rest from myself and from all things that weary me, and thence return arrayed with Thy peace, to do and bear what shall please Thee.”

This prayer expresses the essence of worship which is the seeking, through the fixation of attention, not the delight but rather the peace and purity which can only be found in the consciousness of God.  This peace is the necessary outcome of the indwelling presence.  It ensues when man experiences the radiant atmosphere of the divine communion.