to make it more attractive, to add color and variety, to arrest the attention of the senses are, as ends, beside the point, and our dependence upon them indicates the unhappy state of worship in our day.  That we do thus make our professional music an end in itself is evident from our blatant way of advertising it.  In the same way we advertise sermon themes, usually intended to startle the pious and provoke the ungodly.  We want to arouse curiosity, social or political interest, to achieve some secular reaction.  We don’t advertise that tomorrow in our church there is to be a public worship of God, and that everything that we are going to do will be in the awe-struck sense that He is there.  We are afraid that nobody would come if we merely did that!

What infidels we are!  Why are we surprised that the world is passing us by?  We say and we sing a great many things which it is incredible to suppose we would address to God if we really thought He were present.  Yet anthems and congregational singing are either a sacrifice solemnly and joyously offered to God or else all the singing is less, and worse, than nothing in a church service.  But how often sentimental and restless music, making not for restraint and reverence, not for the subduing of mind and heart but for the expression of those expansive and egotistical moods which are of the essence of romantic singing, is what we employ.  There is a great deal of truly religious music, austere in tone, breathing restraint and reverence, quietly written.  The anthems of Palestrina, Anerio, Viadana, Vittoria among the Italians; of Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart among the Germans; and of Tallis, Gibbons and Purcell among the English, are all of the truly devout order.  Yet how seldom are the works of such men heard in our churches, even where they employ professional singers at substantial salaries.  We are everywhere now trying to give our churches splendid and impressive physical accessories, making the architecture more and more stately and the pews more and more comfortable!  Thus we attempt an amalgam of a mediaeval house of worship with an American domestic interior, adoring God at our ease, worshiping Him in armchairs, offering prostration of the spirit, so far as it can be achieved along with indolence of the body.

So we advertise and concertize and have silver vases and costly flowers and conventional ecclesiastical furniture.  But we still hold a “small-and-early” in the vestibule before service and a “five o’clock” in the chapel afterward.  Sunday morning church is a this-world function with a pietized gossip and a decorous sort of sociable with an intellectual fillip thrown in.  Thus we try to make our services attractive to the secular instincts, the non-religious things, in man’s nature.  We try to get him into the church by saying, “You will find here what you find elsewhere.”  It’s rather illogical.  The church stands for something different.  We say, “You will like to come and be one of us