Is it not a dangerous thing to have brought an ever increasing formality and recognition of a developed and sophisticated community into our social and intellectual life but to have allowed our religious expression to remain so anachronistic?  Largely for social and economic reasons we send most of our young men and young women to college.  There we deliberately cultivate in them the perception of beauty, the sense of form, various expressions of the imaginative life.  But how much has our average non-liturgical service to offer to their critically trained perceptions?  Our church habits are pretty largely the transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions of middle-class family life.  The relations in life which are precious to such youth, the intimate, the mystical and subtle ones, get small recognition or expression.  A hundred agencies outside the church are stimulating in the best boys and girls of the present generation fine sensibilities, critical standards, the higher hungers.  Our services, chiefly instructive and didactic, informal and easy in character, irritate them and make them feel like truculent or uncomfortable misfits.

A third reason for the lack of corporate or public offices of devotion in our services lies in the intellectual character of the Protestant centuries.  We have seen how they have been centuries of individualism.  Character has been conceived of as largely a personal affair expressed in personal relationships.  The believer was like Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  He started for the Heavenly Country because he was determined to save his own soul.  When he realized that he was living in the City of Destruction it did not occur to him that, as a good man, he must identify his fate with it.  On the contrary, he deserted wife and children with all possible expedition and got him out and went along through the Slough of Despond, up to the narrow gate, to start on the way of life.  It was a chief glory of mediaeval society that it was based upon corporate relationships.  Its cathedrals were possible because they were the common house of God for every element of the community.  Family and class and state were dominant factors then.  But we have seen how, in the Renaissance and the Romantic Movement, individualism supplanted these values.  Now, Protestantism was contemporary with that new movement, indeed, a part of it.  Its growing egotism and the colossal egotism of the modern world form a prime cause for the impoverishment of worship in Protestant churches.

And so this brings us, then, to the real reason for our devotional impotence, the one to which we referred in the opening sentences of the chapter.  It is essentially due to the character of the regulative ideas of our age.  It lies in that world view whose expressions in literature, philosophy and social organizations we have been reviewing in these pages.  The partial notion of God which our age has unconsciously made