quite impossible apart from the badges and seals and enrolments and graduations which the fertile American mind invented in order to give physical recognition to intellectual work. The Salvation Army is the visible embodiment of a metaphor. It flees from surplice and crucifix, only to invent its own vestments and carry its own banners. Probably the modern army and navy would be impossible apart from the epaulets and gold braid at which civilians smile. Our colleges and universities are steadily reverting to the academic pageantry of the Middle Ages, finding in the gowns and hoods shelter from the crudeness and extemporaneousness and personal eccentricity which bring all true dignity into contempt.

Of course it will be pointed out that our university decorations are free from the fatal assumption of divine authority which so inheres in ecclesiastical robes and insignia. This is happily true. No man dreams that because a man wears a doctor's gown and a gold tassel he therefore may assume to control the thought or action of his fellow-men. These academic regalia symbolize not authority, but attainment, fellowship, and joy of possession. The moment they become the accouterments of tyranny, that moment we must discard them. But has not the time come in religion when such symbols may be helpers of our joy? If a stained-glass window will help us to conceive the past or the unseen, why not have it? If a processional at the opening of service is more seemly than a choir straggling into church in distractingly various costumes, who shall forbid? The amount of such ceremonial we can wisely use depends on the amount of clear thought and spiritual energy that the church possesses. Liturgy as substitute for thought, and symbol as consolation for departed spiritual life, we cannot admit or endure. First there must be an inside, then an outside. First, the deep realization of God's power and nearness, then for that realization the appropriate and tangible expression. First, the allegiance of the soul to the living Lord, and then the expression of that allegiance in all ritual that is fair and significant and impressive.

There are three essential qualities in all worship-sincerity, a close relation of the ritual to the life which is to follow, and a vivid sense of the presence of the infinite.

Without sincerity, in creed, in symbol, in hymns, in public address,

worship, of course, becomes hollow and positively repellant to truthloving men. All ritual is the expression of previous life, as the seashell is the deposit and envelope of some marine creature which once lived in it. But a museum of empty shells is not more useless than a collection of prayers and hymns and creedal statements which the Christian experience has butgrown. From generation to generation the best formulas of the church must be constantly revised or they will become falsehoods. The Presbyterian church was driven to propose a shorter and simpler creed than the Westminster Confession by the inner demand for an utterance of faith that should be true to present experience. The Church of England is now at work on a revision of that marriage service which has become shocking to modern ears. The imposition of certain liturgical forms upon a generation which has grown away from them is a cause of keenest distress among the clergymen of today. When the modern minister is compelled to say at baptism: "This child is now regenerate," must he not inwardly shrink from the original meaning of the phrase? When he quotes Isaac and Rebekah to the newly wedded pair, does he still regard those Old Testament characters as divinely chosen models? When the church officer standing at the head of the pew sings of himself as

A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,

or cries, in the words of another hymn,

At thy feet

A guilty rebel lies,

is he true to himself and his own experience, or is he hiding behind another man's experience and masquerading in the place of prayer? The hymnology of the church sadly retards its advancing life, and men sing not so much what they feel as what they believe their fathers felt. The disciple of Darwin still labors on Sunday morning to take the world-view of Isaac Watts, and the college Senior after a course in modern ethics endeavors soberly to pronounce himself "vile" as "the dying thief."

These incongruities do not mean deliberate hypocrisy. They mean that the rapidly expanding experience of religion has found in many cases no genuine and worthy expression. It is a twentieth

century spirit still compelled to wear an eighteenth- or sixteenthcentury garb. The average hymnbook is at least fifty years behind the average church, and a hundred years behind the modern conscience. On a recent Sunday evening the writer labored for a half-hour to show the congregation that the old extreme idea of individual escape must now be supplemented by the idea of the salvation of society which Christ embodied in the "Kingdom of God." At the close of the sermon the choir rendered "Let some droppings fall on me"-entirely unconscious that they were melodiously opposing all the preacher had said. But our hymnbooks and choirs are still looking on the world through the eyes of St. Bernard and William Cowper.

Closely connected with sincerity is the maintenance of intimate relation between the worship of the church and the life of the world. Our generation is eager for results. It asks about church service, as about all else, Cui bono? Men of our time are not impatient of serious thought. They are not averse to brooding meditation. The inventor in our day ponders as long and patiently as did St. Francis or St. Dominic. The chemist retires from the world and enters into his closet as seriously as did any mediaeval anchorite. The astronomer understands the value of vigil and self-denial as truly as the monks of the Grande Chartreuse. But this modern withdrawal from the world, this concentration of the mind on fact or truth, is for some clearly defined objective end. The growing approximation of study and life is everywhere obvious. The vocational aim is transforming our universities and our high schools. An education that is a mere luxurious self-indulgence, the mere enjoyment of acquisition, with no thought of future service, is in our generation repudiated by every worthy school.

Then in the church the mere indulgence of emotion under the name of worship can no longer be justified. That emotion may be a delight in stained glass and gorgeous procession and perfumed air, or it may be the happiness of reconciliation with oneself and one's God. But if it does not lead outward into effective action for humanity, if it is not focused on the coming of the Kingdom, it is a spurious thing, a form of self-pity or self-laudation. True worship has in all ages been a preparation for action. So Moses prayed before he led the

host through the sea. So the Continental Congress prayed before it drew up the immortal Declaration. In that spirit was held the Haystack prayer-meeting at Williamstown. In that spirit the primitive church tarried in Jerusalem, preparing for the time when signs and wonders should be done in Corinth, Athens, and Rome.

The lamentable fact is that most of our church services lead nowhere. They conclude in themselves, like the eastern serpent biting its own tail. If the pews are well occupied, the collection large, the singing aesthetically pleasing, if the attention is held by the preacher, and if the congregation breaks up with a pleasurable glow of feeling, we seem to think that the goal of the service has already been reached. But this is to confuse putting on the uniform with fighting the battle. "Is the sermon done?" said a late-comer standing in the vestibule of the church. "No," was the reply, "it is ended, but it yet remains to be done."

The last time I saw Dwight L. Moody, he was full of concern over the aimlessness and ineffectiveness of Sunday-evening services in our great cities. "If I was a young man living in- ," he said, "I would not go to church Sunday evenings. I have looked over the list of all the church announcements, and there is really nothing vital done on Sunday evening. The services are merely weak repetitions of the morning service, with no real object in view." If the men stay away from church today, their absence is not due to innate depravity or to hostility to the Christian faith. It is chiefly because churchgoing seems to the vast majority a pointless custom. Fifty years ago a man must attend church to learn the news of the day, to retain his place in society, to put himself in touch with social and political forces. These reasons are no longer valid, and the modern man asks himself, perhaps unconsciously: What is being actually done at the church? Are opinions being molded, principles and policies discussed, new enterprises started, new moral battles planned? Does the church sound a trumpet-summons, or does it merely administer, under the name of "Christian consolation," a moral anaesthetic? Robert Gould Shaw, bidding his bride farewell at the church door, while he mounted his horse and rode away to die at Fort Wagner, is inexhaustibly suggestive of the relation of church service to heroic endeavor.

And this in no way conflicts with the third characteristic of genuine worship—the sense of the Infinite as immediately present. Both the search for truth and allegiance to duty must be bathed and transfigured in a sense of the unexplored riches, the boundless strength, the overflowing peace, of a present God. There can be no possible substitute for genuine religion-the sense of direct access to the highest and holiest. Yet this is the rarest, as it is the most precious, of human attainments. No eloquence or knowledge in the preacher can make him a true prophet, unless he brings to his congregation this sense of being in the presence-chamber of God, and seeing every problem and task in its relation to the "pattern in the mount."

Here is a constant defect in many ministers of really enlightened intelligence and liberal spirit. They seem to have no sense of wonder left. To their clear eyes the mystery and awe of human life have somehow evaporated, and what Phillips Brooks called "a tight little conception of God" has taken their place. To their rationalistic minds all mystery has been explored and charted; all the deeper enigmas of humanity are explained away. Christianity is reduced to its lowest terms, and all is as fatally clear as in Watts' description of heaven:

No midnight shade, no clouded sun,

But sacred high eternal noon.

Under the dominance of the rationalistic temper, the church becomes a lecture-room, the sermon an address on social or civic morality, and the service of worship a sort of educational convention. From such a service men depart intellectually improved, but with no imperative sense of the immanent God in their lives. In such a service men sit contiguous, but severely isolated, shunning all selfsurrender, constantly on guard against the sudden or the mystical, and so avoiding the deeper experiences of the religious life.

On the other hand, churches that will not submit to this desiccation of faith may err by slipping into an attitude of familiarity, which also excludes genuine sense of God. In such churches the sanctuary is the auditorium, and the vestibule is the "lobby." The people chat lightly before service and forget to pray after it. Such worship habitually ignores the tragedy and burden of the world, and seems to say: "Let not God speak with us, lest we die."