because we are not different.”  The answer is, “I can get the things of this world better in the world, where they belong, than with you.”  Thus we have naturalized our very offices of devotion!  Hence the attempts to revive worship are incongruous and inconsistent.  Hence they have that sentimental and accidental character which is the sign of the amateur.  They do not bring us very near to the heavenly country.  It might be well to remember that the servant of Jahweh doth not cry nor lift up his voice nor cause it to be heard in the streets.

Now, there are many reasons for this anomalous situation.  One of them is our inheritance of a deep-rooted Puritan distrust of a liturgical service.  That distrust is today a fetish and therefore much more potent that it was when it was a reason.  Puritanism was born in the Reformation; it came out from the Roman church, where worship was regarded as an end in itself.  To Catholic believers worship is a contribution to God, pleasing to Him apart from any effect it may have on the worshiper.  Such a theory of it is, of course, open to grave abuse.  Sometimes it led to indifference as to the effect of the worship upon the moral character of the communicant, so that worship could be used, not to conquer evil, but to make up for it, and thus sin became as safe as it was easy.  Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer.

Here is a reason, once valid because moral, for our present situation.  Yet it must be confessed that again, as so often, we are doing what the Germans call “throwing out the baby with the bath,” namely, repudiating a defect or the perversion of an excellence and, in so doing, throwing away that excellence itself.  It is clear that no Protestant is ever tempted today to consider worship as its own reason and its own end.  We are, in a sense, utilitarian ritualists.  Worship to us is as valuable as it is valid because it is the chief avenue of spiritual insight, a chief means of awakening penitence, obtaining forgiveness, growing in grace and love.  These are the ultimates; these are pleasing to God.

A second reason, however, for our situation is not ethical and essential, but economic and accidental.  Our fathers’ communities were a slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancient civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other.  All their life was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the most elemental necessities.  Inevitably the order of their worship corresponded to the order of their society.  It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service with its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society which produced them elements both of high formality and conscious reverence which they could not possibly offer to our luxurious, sophisticated and wealthy age.