the substitute for a comprehensive understanding of Him is essentially to blame.  For since the contemporary doctrine is of His immanence, it therefore follows that it is chiefly through observation of the natural world and by interpretation of contemporary events that men will approach Him if they come to Him at all.  Moreover, our humanism, in emphasizing the individual and exalting his self-sufficiency, has so far made the mood of worship alien and the need of it superfluous.  The overemphasis upon preaching, the general passion of this generation for talk and then more talk, and then endless talk, is perfectly intelligible in view of the regulative ideas of this generation.  It seeks its understanding of the world chiefly in terms of natural and tangible phenomena and chiefly by means either of critical observation or of analytic reasoning.  Hence preaching, especially that sort which looks for the divine principle in contemporary events, has been to the fore.  But worship, which finds the divine principle in something more and other than contemporary events—­which indeed does not look outward to “events” at all—­has been thrown into the background.

It seems to me clear, then, that if we are to emphasize the transcendent elements in religion; if they represent, as we have been contending, the central elements of the religious experience, its creative factors, then the revival of worship will be a prime step in creating a more truly spiritual society.  I am convinced that a homilizing church belongs to a secularizing age.  One cannot forget that the ultimate, I do not say the only, reason for the founding of the non-liturgical churches was the rise of humanism.  One cannot fail to see the connection between humanistic doctrine and moralistic preaching, or between the naturalism of the moment and the mechanicalizing of the church.  “The Christian congregation,” said Luther, child of the humanistic movement, “should never assemble except the word of God be preached.”  “In other countries,” says old Isaac Taylor, “the bell calls people to worship; in Scotland it calls them to a preachment.”  And one remembers the justice of Charles Kingsley’s fling at the Dissenters that they were “creatures who went to church to hear sermons!” It would seem evident, then, that a renewal of worship would be the logical accompaniment of a return to distinctly religious values in society and church.

What can we do, then, better for an age of paganism than to cultivate this transcendent consciousness?  Direct men away from God the universal and impersonal to God the particular and intimate.  Nothing is more needed for our age than to insist upon the truth that there are both common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; that these are not contradictory; that they are complementary; that they are not identical.  It is the church’s business to insist that men must live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular, in order to be able to surmount and